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Hong-er was a quiet baby.

Not always, of course, no baby begins life quietly.

For the first few weeks he was loud, crying at the smallest of noises, the slightest of disturbances. He was sensitive to being held, being put down, being still, being rocked. He hated bright lights, and dark rooms. He would scrunch his face up and howl at temperatures too hot or too cold. He disliked yelling and silence in equal measure and was hungry constantly but struggled to latch.

In other words, he was a perfectly normal baby boy.

Perfect in all ways really. Pale skin and a head of inky black hair. 10 fingers, 10 toes. A button notes and long dark lashes.

The midwife, nothing more than an old woman who had overseen a staggering number of the births within the poorer district of Xianle, had cooed as she dried and weighed him, calling him ‘beautiful’, ‘perfect’, ‘a blessing’.

Leichu, still panting from the efforts of a hard labour, had smiled as the midwife deposited the baby into a basinet at her side. So happy she barely winced when the women’s granddaughter came forward to help her shift further up the bed, propping her up and helping her into a clean, loose robe in preparation for feeding.

A scream pierces the air so suddenly the young women assisting Leichu stumbles back from her bedside in shock.

Leichu whips her head to the side, already focused first and foremost on her baby. She is very young, for a mother and he is her first.

Her husband, while not affectionate and very purposefully not present for the birth, had been happy enough at the knowledge she was pregnant. Leichu knew he would be happy for a son, knew that was what men always wanted for their progeny. Leichu herself was just happy to have a child, given she had no family, it had always been her wish to make a large one of her own.

She never could have conceived the idea of her first born being so perfect.

It already seemed impossible not to love him.

Despite the growing hysteria in the room, she can see no sign of anything worrying. Her baby boy is still a beautiful cream colour, a slight pink sweep over his cheeks and nose. 10 fingers still, 10 toes.

His eyes are open.

The panic grows louder still; other women having entered the room at the initial scream. None of them are standing beside her now, having retreated into the corner of the room until their backs hit the wall.

The old woman trembles with fear, eyes wide and mouth frantically working around prayers.

Leichu looks at her baby in wonder, her dark black eyes meeting her sons for the first time.

One a mirror image of her own. The other a vibrant, jewel-like crimson.

She smiles at him, entranced, extending a carefully finger towards his tiny fist, letting a small gasp slip at the way he grips onto the digit in his own. She reaches for him, taking him into her arms and laying back against the headboard. Her arms fold around him like they were made for nothing more than to hold him. In that moment, she thinks they must have been.

My beautiful boy. She thinks, so happy she can hardly stand the excited trill of her heart.

“It’s a demon!” The old woman hisses. “A curse!”

Leichu looks to her surroundings at the shout, observing the way the room has filled and the space around her and her child have emptied for the first time. She frowns at the words, drawing her baby in towards her instinctively.

“What's going on?” She says, not wanting to put up with such nonsense when she can feel her baby trying to suckle at the skin of her collarbone, obviously already hungry and searching for her.

“That eye!” The woman says, backed by the frantic nodding of the others in the room. One such woman has fallen to her knees in prayer, tears falling from her eyes like she believes her life is in imminent danger. “The boy is cursed, a demon child.”

Leichu thinks the words are ridiculous. Regardless, she feels tears building at the edges of her lash line and her lip trembles despite herself. Perhaps it is the atmosphere, or the lingering pain of labour, or the wide fluctuation of her hormones in the absence of something her body has accommodated and adapted to for the best part of a year.

Some small thing shifts in the older woman’s face, a slash of sympathy amid the fear and repulsion.

“It’s not your fault dear.” She says, placating and kind but making no move to come closer. If anything, she recoils further, disguised in a deep breath and shoulders that straighten from their previous hunch. “We’ll help do what needs to be done.”

Leichu looks between them all, clutching her child even closer to her skin. He starts to sniffle against her, limbs straining against the blanket he’s wrapped in, mouth opening in a sharp cry. She tries to adjust him, tries to rock him. She doesn’t know what she is doing past the instinctual need to comfort and console.

“What is this about?” She asks, words coming out soft and unsure, as the others flinch away from her baby's cry as if the sound itself is an attack.

“It’s a cursed thing, monstrous, misfortunate; none would blame you for doing what you have to in order to protect yourself from it.” The old woman explains, seeming to steady herself enough to take a single step towards the young mother.

She holds her hands out, face set in grim determination despite the way they shake.

“There are humane ways of doing what is necessary. There would be no pain.”

“What are you saying!” Leichu cries, wrapping her loose robe further around herself and her son as she scrambles from the bed to re-establish the distance between herself and the other women. She tilts her body to shield her son from them, hissing in pain as she bleeds down her thighs at the movement. She looks between them all fretfully, trying to find a single friendly face amidst them. “He’s just a baby!”

“I know this must be difficult for you, but the child is a curse to you and your family. It's future was already fated to be unfortunate given it’s time and date of birth, I fear this only solidifies that it's star is accurate in its prediction.”

“What star?” Leichu asks, shrinking away even further as the old woman takes another singular step towards her.

She knows, of course, what the expected birth date of her child had been. There had been mummers and rumours regarding it through her every visit to the village healers. She had not been ignorant to the fact she was the only women expecting in the entire district for several months, the next birth not forecast for at least two. She had never put much stock in it, how could something as distant and dynamic as the stars shape the future of her child, why would the gods care to alter the life of a mortal over something so insignificant?

“The Star of Solitude.” The woman confirms, the confirmation only strengthening the frantic prayers of the younger women still kneeling near the corner of the room, several more drop down to join her at the words.

Leichu shakes her head, cradling her baby to her neck regardless of the desperate, heart-breaking cries that ring into her ear. “He could never be a misfortune to me. He’s perfect, he’s mine!”

“Give it to us my dear, we will make sure this has no repercussion to you.”

“Get away from me!” Leichu screams, darting past them all until she can keep her back to the open doorway, unwilling to let any of them out of her sight.

She leaves a trail of blood as she moves. The pain is nothing compared to the agony of her son’s distress ringing through the room.

“I won’t let you touch him. How dare you!”

She backs into the doorway as the woman makes another abortive effort to reach her. She is aided by the fact she seems unwilling to so much as touch him. Even still she can scarcely think from the rush of adrenaline, fear, and confusion.

How could things have altered so drastically? How could they react so badly to something so beautiful, so unique?

“You’re making a mistake. Don’t let that thing ruin your life!” The granddaughter calls to her from her place on the floor, she is shaking where she sits, looking up to her with eyes blown wide in shock.

“Even the Crown Prince was born under an ominous star, are you implying he should have been drowned in the nearest river as well?” Leichu hisses, finally turning her gaze away from them long enough to to shush gently against her son’s downy black hair.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“How could you talk like that about His Highness!”

“It’s the curse! It’s driven her mad already!”

Leichu shakes her head, nothing more than an extension of the tremors already racking her entire frame. “Don’t come near me or my baby again, any of you!”

She flees as best she can through the quiet agony of her wounded body, never once regretting the precious bundle she holds to her chest, regardless of the way her blood falls from her and her limbs jerk in protest.

It is not so much blood that she cannot heal from it, she can tell that already. Her mother had died in labour to a stillborn younger sister when she was seven. Leichu remembers how much blood signified fatality and knew this to be far closer to normal loss.

She remembered also, the desolate cries of her father, the way he could not look at her after that day without pain, the way she woke one morning to an empty house and silence.

She could never abandon her child. Not after that.

“My beautiful boy.” She whispers, placing a shaky kiss to his temple, worshiping the only way she can.

He has quieted against her, eyes hooded. She smiles as she spots the sleepily curved edge of red beneath his right eyelashes.

“My Hong-er.”

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

It is a universally acknowledged fact that raising a baby, especially in the post labour phase, is made substantially easier when supported by a network of equally loving and supportive people.

Leichu was unfortunate before Hong-er was born.

She had no mother, no father, no siblings. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. She had no prospects past her beauty; pale skin, small frame, pitch black hair tumbling down her back in gentle waves and big doe eyes of a shade barely lighter than coal.

Beauty is and always will be, a double-edged sword.

She initially thought herself lucky when, at 15, she received a marriage offer. It was her only real chance of a future outside of prostitution, or as a concubine if she was lucky enough to catch the eye of the Royal House of Xie.

She had not known Li Mencius prior to his proposal, though she recognised him from a group of men who would occasionally watch the local girls dance and sing in-between taking wash loads to the river for the more affluent members of the district.

The work offered her little money, no more than enough for a meal or two a day and a bed-mat a night in a room shared with four of the other village orphans. All female, of course, she knew sons to be too precious a thing to leave or loose.

Li Mencius was a silversmith. He proposed to her not with a ring, but a beautiful silver collar. It was expertly crafted even to her limited knowledge of such things, hanging over her collarbones in a fluid swirl of metal so intricate it almost appeared like lace against her robes, adorned by a single embellished butterfly, wings fixed with pressed glass like the windows she had seen in the newer constructed temples, the ones that depicted battles and triumphs in all manner of beautiful colours and designs.

She accepted.

What else was she to do?

Mencius was kind to her through their engagement, had not even taken her to bed until the night they were wed. She had just turned 16 and thought herself young and in love and fated to finally receive some good fortune.

She had not thought much of his increasing distance after their wedding and had been bolstered by a relatively positive reaction to her announcement that she was with child, not three months after having married.

Her pregnancy had been difficult, even more so with keeping up the regular chores of any good wife to a hardworking husband, who still, of course, wanted the full ability to utilise his wife after a long day.

She was often sore, often sick, often tired and upset, very frequently she just didn’t want to. 

But she was a wife first and foremost, and she considered herself lucky to be so.

Leichu, knowing little of relationships, and even less of marriage, never considered that anything was amiss.

Men could be cold, men could be demanding, men could even be violent, occasionally. Only - in her perception - when their wife had done something wrong.

That of course meant cessation of violence was her responsibility. A better wife would not be treated badly at all.

As her due date drew nearer it became harder and harder to please him, and she felt as if she had failed in her role as a mother before she had even held her baby.

She prayed to the gods for a son. A strong, healthy son, that would please her husband and settle their family into something soft and safe and loving.

She was unfortunate before Hong-er. It was nothing compared to the misfortune that befell her after his birth.

None of that was Hong-er’s fault.

He was her baby, her son, her beautiful boy, everything that she had prayed for and more. A blessing, a pleasure, a gift.

She was just so tired.

And it was so different from what she expected.

And no one would help her.

Mencius had taken one look at the child, her child, their child and disowned him. Claiming she must have fornicated with a demon, with a ghost, as something so garish could not possible have resulted from him. It appeared to her that it was purely for the avoidance of scandal, of embarrassment that she has been allowed to remain in their home, leaving the others in the village to coo over how ‘forgiving’ her husband was, how ‘generous’ and ‘charitable’.

Leichu had assumed that she would have very little to do with her husband after that, she was no longer just a wife but a mother, after all.

She was barely healed before her duties as a wife were required again.

Mencius would grunt his usual praises into her ear, her neck, her hair. How she was so beautiful, so small, so young.

Leichu stared into the middle distance, listening for Hong-er in the bassinet by the bedside.

He would cry for her, as he always did, his wails echoing through the room. It broke her heart to be unable to go to him. Mencius, sensing her attention on their son would slow his thrusts, drag the whole affair out and only let himself finish once Hong-er had cried himself into hoarseness, only let her go to him once the baby has stopped crying for her completely, laying silent and confused in his crib.

This, above all else, was what broke her down in the end.

There was something cathartic in Hong-er’s constant and demanding need for her. Something cruel in the steadfast way Mencius held her back from attending to him, forced her to ignore his cries until she rarely heard a single noise from him, left him without a feed until her milk dried up too early and she had to beg the local farmer for some cow’s milk that she could boil down and bottle feed him.

It made him sick and made her sick with worry to see him so.

Even when he was flushed and uncomfortable and pained, the most he would utter was a single weak wail, tapering off into silence almost as soon as it began, like his discomfort was the only thing that could momentarily make him forget his desperate requests for comfort were pointless.

Even at the slightest, weakest, most bitten off cry, Mencius would pull her away.

“Filthy demon.” He’d hiss. “Things like that should be drowned.”

The very thought sent fear racing down Leichu’s spine, leaving her to beg and plead and distract him with the only thing she’d ever had available to her. Leaving Hong-er even more alone, even more ignored, but safe.

In the end, it was not having a loud baby that killed Leichu.

It was having a quiet one.

Late at night, she would crawl from Mencius’ grip, move silently over the wooden floors of their humble house, and take Hong-er from his crib, covered in little more than a threadbare blanket to protect him from the chill.

She would hold him to her as she had all those months ago, when the women had screamed his wrongness to her.

She would carry him with careful arms and settle with him at the foot of the first path leading from their house, trodden down by the horses of customers requesting her husband’s trade.

Hong-er would stare up at her silently. Big, beautiful eyes looking around in confusion, too thin body shifting at the unfamiliar feeling of softness, of hands that do not tug and pinch and shake.

He has a bruise along the right side of his face, curving around the edge of his red eye. There are others under his clothes, and sores from the pressure of lying supine for too long, from not being changed frequently enough. He does not look surprised that he is in pain, he looks surprised that she is not purposefully causing more.

He even breathes silently, now.

It breaks her heart.

“My baby boy.” She whispers, leaning down to press a kiss to his temple. “My Hong-er.”

He flinches as she draws near to him, the most violent reaction she has seen him have in weeks.

Something in her shatters. 

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

“Mama.” Hong-er says, two years old and toddling at her bedside.

It is his only word. He has been slow to walk, slower still to talk. He has no one to teach him, simply observation and a growing need to get out of the way.

He is not encouraged to speak, but he has just become big enough to crawl onto the drawers placed before the window of their house, looking out with wide eyes at the people that run and walk and play outside. He has seen others his age grab onto the skirts of the women who walk with them, calling the word until they get a reaction and smiling widely as they do.

“Mama.” Hong-er says again.

As usual, the woman on the bed says nothing in return. She does little more than blink these days.

It does not matter, Hong-er loves her dearly.

She is the only one who never hurts him.

Sometimes, she will even turn her head in the night, meaning that he can shuffle over to her from the corner where he sits and look into her eyes with his own.

She never once flinches from him, never turns away in disgust, never spits or curses, even when he is not wearing the bandages.

“Mama.” Hong-er says, to fill the silence. He pretends that her blink is a response, and blinks back to her.

The room she rests in is small and cold, Hong-er can see her fingers shaking from their place on her chest. He shuffles back over to his corner and picks up his blanket. It is threadbare and small, and he trips over a ratty end of it as he pulls it towards her. His hands scuff as he falls, catching on rough patches in the wood, his lip wobbles as he presses his bloody grazes to the fabric, safe in the knowledge that it is his only possession, so it does not matter if it is ruined further.

He reaches the bedside again, pulling the blanket up with both hands until he can arrange it over the woman’s chest, trying to tug it down to cover as much of her small torso as he can.

He does not know if it helps. He hopes it does.

Hong-er sits back into his corner, barren now of even the barest softness or comfort. He pulls his legs up to his chest and hugs them to preserve some warmth. He falls asleep watching the steady rise and fall of the women’s chest, knowing instinctively that this is a comfort, and listening to the familiar calls of the children outside his home, the way the women with them reply to their calls with laughs and coos and names.

Perhaps he is saying it wrong? Perhaps it is not his word to say?

He wonders what she would call him if she were to reply.

Hong-er hopes that one day, he will be good enough to hear it.

She does not move from her position until the sun has shifted its way across the sky, the late day rays bathing her form in muted reds, yellows, and pinks. Hong-er does not see her shift, having fallen into a fitful sleep with his head tightly curled into the small gap between his raised knees and his chest. Leichu does little more than turn, lidded eyes falling onto her small, shaking son.

His blanket’s gone. She assumes Mencius has taken that from him too.

Long past the ability to focus on more than one thing at once, her hands and body are too numb to feel the irregular warmth of a familiar threadbare blanket laid over her.

“Hong-er.” She tries, managing little more than a whisper of noise from her parched lips.

The very effort of it exhausts her, she cannot summon another attempt.

He’s so small where he sits, too bony for a toddler, too drawn. His robes have slipped off his shoulder and his collarbones stand out in sharp relief. Leichu can just see a dark swipe of bruises around his neck from the angle his head has fallen onto his knee. She is glad, only this one instance, that she cannot see his right eye, knowing it is always the pinpoint of the violence against him. The area is so frequently discoloured it is only in her earliest memories she can remember the beautiful ivory tint of unblemished skin surrounding such a vibrant shade of red, like lipstick applied to his iris.

She is so tired, it takes all her energy to keep her eyelids from falling closed again, wanting just a few more minutes of watching him. Her baby boy.

She hears the front door open eventually, watching with quiet despair as her son flinches from the noise as if struck. He makes no move to rise, barely breathes where he sits, cramming his back so far into the corner the harsh wall must scrape against his prominent vertebrae. He covers a hand over his right eye like a reflex, pulling the uncut edge of his pitch-black hair over it until only the left side of his face is visible.

Mencius swirls into the room like a storm.

If Hong-er could get any smaller he’d cease to exist.

“Get out.” He snarls, barely throwing a glance to the child when he notices Leichu’s consciousness, ripping the tatty blanket from her chest and throwing it into the unlit kiln he uses for his work. “I told you not to come in here, you’re making her worse!”

Hong-er hardly dares to look at him, scrambling to exit the room and escape to whatever place an unwanted two-year-old could conceivably run too.

Mencius grabs him by the hair as he flees, uncaring of the sharp cry that wrestles from Hong-er’s tightly clenched lips at the pain.

“If I see you in here again-” He hisses, emphasising each point with a shake. “-I’ll rip that curse out of your ugly little head myself.”

Hong-er is dropped to the ground, landing on already scraped hands with a bitten off gasp of pain. He scrambles back to his feet unsteadily, praying not to fall in front of this man, who already mocks his delayed development, his inability to learn, his uselessness in all things past being wrong.

He flees from the house and toddles to the woods, where he can hide amidst things that do not have enough consciousness to hate him.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Hong-er is 5 when his Mama dies.

He should have started school the year before, but Mama had become very unwell over the winter, even more so than usual, and the man had allowed him to sit at the doorway of her room to watch her chest as he always used to. Making sure the steady rise and fall never stopped. Occasionally, he was even allowed to fetch her a pitcher of water, when the coughs came and persisted enough that it disrupted the breaths.

It was his favourite job, he learned quickly to only fill the cup a quarter of the way, so he could hold it with one hand to her mouth and fit his other to the back of her head, marvelling at the silky strands of long, black hair trickling down to the floor from where she lies.

“Mama.” He would say, and even if she did not reply, the word would always, always, prompt her to drink.

He was beginning to understand words, to copy them and recite them as best he could manage on his own with little direct interaction. Many of them he had no context for other than that they were bad and related to him. Things like ‘brat’, and ‘demon’, and ‘monster’ and ‘curse’. He often hoped for a nice name, like the other boys who ran in the streets, laughing and playing together, shouting out to each other in words that sounded friendly and kind, rather than spiteful and loathing.

He still wished that Mama would respond to him, so that he might know something other than slurs.

Still, the year preceding his start to school was a comparatively good one. He was allowed to sit inside during the day while the man worked in the larger workshop attached to the house. Sometimes, when Mama was bad, and the paleness of her skin had been shot through with angry red veins and splotches, the man would stay in the main house and work on smaller projects in the kiln there.

Hong-er did not like those days, when he was no longer needed, wanted or necessary.

Luckily, they were few and far between, and most of that year was spent in comparably luxury to the previous ones.

He was occasionally chucked Mama’s food if she did not eat it (she rarely ate more than two spoonfuls on a good day, but he was not always permitted to finish it before it was thrown into an accumulating pile of rotted waste a couple of meters from the backside of the house – on desperate days, when the burning ache in his stomach became sharp enough to nearly cripple him, he would resort to stealing the freshest batch of waste right from the pile) and he was occasionally tolerated in the house even when the man came back, so long as he was silent and small.

It was warm inside with how often the kiln was run, and he would often find himself pressed beneath the metal door, relishing in the lingering heat.

Then came the day the rise and fall stopped.

Mama had been bad all day, chest so shallow in its movement Hong-er had to crawl forward to the bedside to see it.

The man had stayed that morning, taking one look at Leichu’s sweat slicked hair and red flushed cheeks and rightly assessing a brewing fever. 

Hong-er had crept forward incrementally, until he has been able to rest a chilled hand against Mama’s own, hanging limp over the edge of the bed-mat.

The man had watched him over the top of his work on an intricate silver dagger, working his emblem into the hilt of the blade and periodically reheating it in the kiln when unsatisfied with the result. Uncommonly, he had said nothing about the child’s approach, simply drifted his gaze back and forward from the too pale child to his red flushed wife.

“Mama?” The child says, so quietly he would have confused it for a boy out in the streets if it weren’t for the late hour dictated by the pitch-black room, lit up only in gold from the kiln and silver from the moonlight.

It is almost enough to make Mencius startle; he had not known the child could speak. His attention is quickly redirected to his wife, who’s eyes are open and sightless, thrashing her head weakly against the sheets until her dark hair snags against the friction.

The thrashing grows to trembles, to jerks and spasms, bloody froth building against her lip-line and trickling down her cheek. She chokes, prompting Mencius to jump forward, knocking the child out of the way to roll her onto her side.

40 agonising seconds later she settles, body falling limp against his stomach and hips, eyes still open and shrouded with confusion. Her breath is laboured, too quick initially then frighteningly slow. Her pulse when he reaches for it, is irregular and rapid, then irregular and slow.

She is dying.

Mencius turns to the boy, an inordinate level of fury flaring in his chest. The boy’s hair has jostled to the side from the shove, ragged bandages falling around his neck, hands rested back to catch himself against the hard stone floor. His right wrist is swelling and disjointed, his legs crumpled under him in shock. His wide eyes are fixed onto Leichu, both visible for the first time in two years, ever since he had taken to wearing the ragged cloth against his right side, a feeble effort to avoid the man’s ire from catching a glimpse of red through the fall of his hair.

The boy’s gaze turns to him as he stalks forward, having to crane his neck to see his face given his height. They widen even more as he notices the furious look etched onto his face, making an abortive effort to slap a hand up to his uncovered right eye. His broken wrist protests the movement, but the boy seems too frantic to care, scrambling on his other limbs until he can force himself back into the corner of the room.

Mencius grabs him by the throat, lifting him to eye level, uncaring for the way he chokes, or his legs flail uselessly in the air. He shoves him back into the wall, pinning him to it with a single hand as he battles futilely in the grip.

“This is your fault.” He sneers, taking delight in the way the boy flinches back from the heat of the breath against his face.

Those eyes stare up at him in abstract terror. He fixes his gaze to the cursed right one as if it is its own being.

“You killed your own Mother.”

Hong-er shakes his head, shakes all over, shuts his eyes against the words.

He wishes he still knew nothing of them, that he had not needed to know any more than the one he started with. Hong-er had felt it silly, to try so hard to learn words when he so rarely spoke anything at all. It was easier to be silent when you had no words to speak. 

He does not speak now, he has no words for this fear, this agony.

“Did you hear me, demon?” Mencius snarls, gripping tighter into the delicate skin of the boy’s neck. “You. Killed. Her.”

Hong-er shakes in his grip, still feebly trying to lift a hand to cover the right side of his face.

“She was fine before she had you. She was beautiful. She was mine.” He growls, angry crescents forming in lines along the skin beneath his hand, his middle finger digging in sharp enough to draw blood. “You are nothing more than a curse, a misfortune, an ugly, malformed blight. You should have never been born!”

Mencius sucks in an angry breath, quivering from head to toe in barely suppressed rage. He flings the boy to the side, careless of the way he impacts the floor. The boy does not cry out, merely scratches against his own throat, and tries to pull air in through desperate gasps.

Leichu, when Mencius glances back, is blinking through the fog of her eyes, head still twisting restlessly side to side, almost like a shake of her head if there were any obvious consciousness behind it.

“I should kill you for what you’ve done to her.”  

The boy’s inhalations are tinged with pain, his eyes ringed with black and spotted through with angry burst veins. He sinks his head further down towards the floor, hair falling in a tangled tumble over his shoulders. He whispers something, so quietly it is inaudible when coupled with his ruined throat.

“Pathetic.” He spits, the boy barely registering the spittle as it lands.

The boy rises to his hands and knees, shifting back until he can sit with his legs knelt beneath him, his head tilted down to the floor as if in prayer.

“Would it help?” He says, louder and therefore rougher, though still quiet enough to register as little more than a murmur. 

“What?”

“If you did.” The boy looks up to him, eyes wide and tired and sad. The type of numb resignation that wipes your tears before they can fall, a mimicry of comfort. “Would it help?”

Mencius lets of a brittle laugh, shaking his head in disgust that something so pitiful could ever have been considered his son. “You could die a thousand times over, and it would never undo the damage you’ve wrought just by being born.”        

“What about…” The boy starts, stopping to wet his lips, tinging them red.

“Spit it out, brat.”

“If you…” The boy reaches up to claw at his own eye, pulling deep enough scratches through the skin to leave bloody trails trickling down his cheek.

Mencius startles just slightly, a single step back in surprise. The boy shakes where he sits, opening his mouth in an agonised cry, the loudest sound he’s made since he was a week-old baby.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want it!”

“What are you going to do about it?” Mencius sneers, regaining his momentary lapse in composure enough to cajole him in his misery. “Claw it out? You think that’s the only thing wrong with you?”

The boy sobs, fingernails fixed into the skin of his brow and upper cheek, wrist swollen and darkening to bruises from the consistent pressure, a ring of belladonna blossoms blooming around his neck. It is one of the most satisfying things Mencius can recall seeing, maybe only second to that first spill of blood from Leichu on their wedding night, all those years ago. Possession and pain summarising themselves to his pleasure. It makes him greedy, makes him hungry, makes him want more.

“She’s dying. You killed her.” He spits again, watching with satisfaction the way the words land, how they impact the boy's back like a whip strike.

“I didn’t!” He wails, tears tinted red as they fall from his cursed eye. He makes to move to her side, falling to the ground as he puts weight onto his broken wrist. “Mama!”

“Leave her the fuck alone.” Mencius says, pulling him back by the collar with a slap. “You’ve done enough.”

The boy scrambles in his hold, like a feral thing. Reaching up to scratch those bloody nails along the man’s forearm as it holds him. He barely cuts the surface of the skin, leaving Mencius to idly wonder how exactly he drew blood on himself so easily. The boy’s eyes are wide and fixed, looking directly to Leichu as she coughs more bloody froth onto the floor at her side.

“Mama!”

“Get that filthy eye off her or I swear to the gods-”

The boy manages to struggle in his grasp enough to reach up and grab at his arm, latching onto the skin of his wrist with his teeth and biting down until he tastes blood. Mencius swears, swigging his arm in an arc strong enough to dislodge the boy entirely, crumpling him to the floor again with an audible crack of bone.

That finally does pull a proper wail of pain from the boy, rolling his weight away from his right leg as best he can with his swollen, useless wrist. Mencius lets out an unsteady breath, arms and fists twitching with the anger thrumming through his veins. He can feel the blood from the bite dripping down his fist, matching his breaths to the steady rhythm of droplets as they impact the floor.

In turning away, his eyes light onto the kiln, still lit and securing the red-hot blade of the dagger he is forging.

He looks back to the boy, latching his gaze onto the ugly eye that bleeds red down his face. He clenches his hand into a fist and smiles.

“You want it gone?” He says, reaching the boys side in a single large step of the small room, grabbing his hair, and curling it around his fist. He drags the boy closer to the kiln, one thin leg scrambling for purchase on the floor as the other trails uselessly behind him. “You want it gone that badly?”

“I want Mama!”

He pulls the boy up to his workbench, refitting his fingertips to the bruises along his neck. “You killed her.”

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t!” The boy shakes, clawing at the hands around his throat until he can latch them into the bloody wound from his bite.

“You want it gone?” Mencius says, only pressing harder in retaliation for the pain, he reaches for the dagger with his other hand, flipping the handle until he can hover the red-hot blade over the boy’s face.

“Mama!” He screeches, half his limbs hanging useless and half scrambling desperately against his hold. His eyes are wide and beseeching, his voice pitched high and frantic with tears and terror. “I want Mama!”

Mencius only smiles, face drawing close to the boy's, feeling the blistering heat of the blade by his own cheek as he trails it closer. He hovers the blade over that ugly, garish red for a moment, appreciating the way the boy oscillates between pushing back against the bench and forward against his grip.

“Let’s get rid of it then.”

“MAMA!” The cry is piercing in the otherwise quiet street, a shrill, sharp scream.

And then…

“Don't-” Mencius hears, barely more than a croak from the bed.

He drops the blade to the floor, uncaring for the way it scorches into the hard floor, even less for the hiss of pain as it burns across the boy’s shoulder in its descent.

Mencius whirls to face the bed, meeting eyes with his wife for the first time in years, still foggy, still most of the way gone somewhere he cannot follow, but present and aware.

“Please…” She starts, her voice like glass shards in its disuse. “Don’t… don’t hurt...”

Mencius stumbles to her side, lifts a hand to cup her cheek and wipe at the tears that overflow from her lash line. Gods but she is beautiful, so beautiful, so young even now.

“You promised… you said…” She starts, unable to get the words out. She settles for staring up at him, a plea with the only thing she has left.

“…Leichu, look what it did to you.” He murmurs, shaking his head in misery, in disgust. He knew, of course, that she had never slept with another, that the boy was his.

It was still too terrible a thing to accept.          

“I want… let me see h-.” She is so hoarse it’s barely an audible request, more the movement of her lips and a pleading glance to the boy still slumped by the kiln, bloody and bruised and birdlike in his crumpled form, his broken bones and raven hair.

The boy turns as he approaches, cowering from the hand that grasps his broken arm, shoving him forward to the side of the bed. Hong-er lifts his head, rearranging his tangled hair to cover as much of his face as he can. His eye is met by a pair so dark he cannot distinguish a pupil in the low-lit room.

There is a smile on the woman’s face, adoration in her gaze. It is so foreign to him he can do little more than stare back at her.

“Mama?” He says, voice hoarse from screaming, iron tickling his throat.

And finally, finally, she replies.

“Hong-er.” She says, with that watery, unsteady smile, lifting a trembling hand to drag only once through his hair, pushing it back until she can stare into both of his eyes together. “My baby…my beautiful boy.”

“Mama.” He says again, for he is spellbound, and has nothing else to say.

She pulls him, just lightly, with the hand having draped down to rest over his shoulder after expelling so much energy to see his face. He moves forward obediently, not fearing rebuttal for a second, not fearing anything at all.        

Leichu presses a single kiss against his right temple, worshipful.

“Mama loves you.”

Then she is gone.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Hong-er attends school a year late, not long after his mother died.

He does not stay long.

The children are already secluded into packs and groups when he joins. He does not ask to join, and no one asks him if he would like to.

He is greeted by frowns from many of the teachers. They look at his too large clothes, the way they fall around too thin limbs and slip enough to reveal bruises and abrasions and burns no matter how tight he ties them and how stiffly he walks, and suspect, but never say. They look again, at the old bandages he keeps firmly wrapped around the left side of his face and assume they hide more of the same, rather than something much worst, something that Hong-er knows would turn those small, concerned frowns into sneers and scorn.

It is his third week, and they are gathered into the school hall for the day, 30 or so children of varying ages huddled together in the room with a flock of their teachers leading a set of activities dedicated to the celebration of Taizi Dianzia’s birthday. He is turning twelve that very day, and the celebrations in both the palace and the streets have been going from midnight the day before and will continue until midnight the next day.

Hong-er had heard the celebrations, but this is the first he is hearing about a ‘birthday celebration’ or about ‘Taizi Dianzia’.

He, of course, understands that there is a royal family, he knows there is a King and Queen of Xianle, and that they have a son.

It is difficult for him to understand that a child is a celebrated thing, even the ones he sees on the street are often underfoot, only really regarded fondly by their parents and their family. That parents could actively want and love their children had been a revelation to him already, though his father had swiftly remarried, and seeing the way his stepmother treated her own sons, in comparison to the way she treated him, had reminded him that the problem did not lie with children, but with him specifically.

He tries not to look too confused by everything they are saying or doing, shifting his bandages further across his face.

The teachers explain to them about birth stars and the way this predicts someone’s fortune and future.

They talk about Taizi Dianzia and his fortune, granted to the King and Queen by the princes Guoshi the first week of his birth. An ominous star, that the prince seems destined to turn in his favour, set for unfathomable fortune.

Hong-er stays quiet, looking down at his hands and clenching his fingers into the centre of his palm in a rhythm.

The children take turns to say their date and time of birth, many already announcing their stars and their fortune to the class a whole.

Hong-er stays very quiet, and hopes they forget that he is there.

“Hong-er.” One of the teachers calls eventually, prompting a heavy frown onto his face. “Tell us yours and we’ll calculate it for you.”

He looks down to his hands, folded into his lap, picking at a stray scab along his calf.

“Don’t be shy Hong-er.” The teacher says, kneeling down in front of the boy and tilting her head toward him, offering her ear. “Why don’t you whisper it to me?”

“…I don’t know it.” He mumbles, peeling the scab from the barely healed wound and quickly pressing a thumb down against the blood that follows.

“Your birthday?” The teacher says, tilting her head in confusion. “You must know it, just tell me, we don’t have to shout it to the class.”

“He does know.” One of the boys towards the back of the group leers, a couple of years older than Hong-er and flanked by two other boys of the same age. “He just doesn’t want to say.”

“If that’s the case Hong-er, how about you just write it down for me?”

He stares at the proffered pen and parchment. He doesn’t know how to write. Somehow, even at this age, that seems like something mortifying to admit to, one more thing about him that is altogether wrong.

“That’s not why.” The boy beside the original speaker says, accent much more pronounced, but sneer just as easily detectable. “It’s ‘cus he’s cursed.”

Hong-er whips his head round to glare at the boy, being met with nothing more than a smirk.

“My Ma was there when he was born.” The boy continues, eyes fixed onto Hong-er like a cat upon a mouse, not hungry so much as hunting. “Star of Solitude wasn’t it, little demon?”

Hong-er does not understand the reference to the star, not yet, but knows it is a bad thing in the way he always knew the words the man called him were bad, or the way the village looked at him was different and dangerous, or the way his brothers and step-mother hurting him was allowed and okay because it was him rather than someone else. Even their teacher before him flinches back as if burned, like even mild proximity to him is enough to catch. 

“Got a curse in his eye and everything.” Their teachers gaze flickers to the bandage, as does everyone else's in the room, leaving Hong-er to shrink back in the steadfast understanding that attention to such a focal part of him is never a good thing. “That’s why he wears those bandages.”

“A real bringer of misfortune.” Another boy pipes up, like it is a game to be won, as if the most revealing, hurtful, damning sentence will win out over all the others and reign superior. “Even killed his own mother off.”

“No! I didn’t!” Hong-er says, the very first thing he has. He does not want to speak, does not want to be here at all, but it is the first sentence he cannot bear to hear, the first he cannot comprehend as true for the sake of his own sanity.

“Yes, you did, my father works with yours.” The last boy to speak insists, sneer cut across his face like a wound. He takes a step closer to Hong-er and visibly delights at the barely repressed flinch. “He tells them all sorts about you.”

Another boy nods his confirmation. “And my mother washes with his new wife at the river.”

“You killed her.” The first speaks again, voices joining and merging in a cacophony. “There’s no use denying it.”

“I didn’t!”

“You’re a curse.” Another boy scouts from further back, blonde hair barely visible over the group. “You’ll probably bring the whole village down.”

“My Ma said we should drown you.” A girl this time, stepping forward with confidence even as her hands fiddle with the hem of her skirt. “Or offer you up as a sacrifice to the Gods.”

“The Gods would take that as an insult, who would want a demon?”

“I’m not!”

The words continue, the noise grows, their teacher long retreated and simply watching the group turn against the very smallest person in the room.

Every word is like a bruise, a burn, a brand. Hong-er finds himself unable to retaliate, shuttered by a limited vocabulary and an inability to discount nearly everything being said as anything other than true. He does not understand why they are all so insistent on telling him these things, as if he does not know them intimately already, as if there is anything they could call him he does not believe of himself anyway.

It’s the first time Hong-er ‘starts’ a fight.

It’s far from the last.

The other village parents flock together to complain to his father and stepmother. He has no love for his family, not with his mother gone, but it is still a shock to be so unceremoniously kicked from the house.

He has no possessions, no money, no food or water, no clothes other than what he wears. The only thing that saddens him is the loss of connection to the place where Mama died, the place where her ashes are.

He finds himself bereft of anywhere to go and wanders until he finds a small outcropping of rocks with just enough space for him to shimmy down beneath the topmost layer. It is cold, and uncomfortable, but so were the floors at the house, and at least it will keep him dry if there is rain in the night.

Being homeless is difficult for anyone, even more so for a child loathed by the entire city.

He learns more important things than school could have ever taught him.

How old a piece of food can be before it makes him sick, and how this differs depending on what it is.

The best alleys and corners to hide in when the other children are bored and looking to play with something they will receive no punishment for hurting.

How to wash wounds and find salt stones to sterilise them.

How to keep to the shadows and hide his face to avoid the jeers and insults hurled his way.

Why these hurt more than a punch, or a kick, ever could.

He observes how others make money from nothing, and quickly learns he has no skills to sell, no songs to sing and no beauty to barter.

He tries not to be bitter about the way the pretty ones can simply wave a lock of hair around their finger and smile to a wealthy man, coming back a few hours later with enough money for a bed and a meal. He knows it is not so straightforward, has been around and alone long enough to know exactly what is exchanged. But surely even fake affection is better than none.

He is so starved for kindness, even the rock he sleeps under feels like an embrace.

He is so hungry he has taken to sucking at the skin of his hand for dregs of salt and so cold from the tail end of a harsh winter that never left his aching bones that he has tried several times to approach the pile of strays clinging to the edge of the forest.

He has not spoken more than a shout of pain in years and the sickness’s that fall upon him from dirty water and broken wounds are so frequent he is often surprised he wakes up at all.

He begins to wish he wouldn’t.

It starts as nothing more than an idea; it becomes something of an obsession.

He is 10 when he tries to die.

He is unsuccessful in a way he never considered.

How odd, that someone would rescue him?

His whole life becomes Taizi Dianzia.

It makes everything better.

It changes nothing at all.

The beatings persist, in fact they are worse. The carriage was one of the most painful things he’d ever experienced, but he saw Taizi Dianxia again, and that was all that mattered.

Taizi Dianzia ascends, and Hong-er has religion to fall back on, for the first time in his life. Has shrines to tend to and sleep in and leave offerings at.

The plague hits, and the sicknesses are worse than they have ever been.

The drought in Yong-an leads to an influx of refugees before the gates are shut. An influx of refugees leads to low supplies of food, of fresh water. Hong-er hardly notices, his stomach does not call to him anymore.

He meets his God again in the shrine he is tending. He is faint with hunger; his mouth so dry he can only pray to cough blood and wet it.

His God appears to him, calls out to him to live, to take the offerings, to exist for him if nothing else.

Gege. He thinks, for the first time. Innocent and childlike.

A big brother.

It is the first time Hong-er dares to think of his god with such familiarity. He forgets, in his stunned admiration, that his misfortune targets family first and foremost.

Evidently, the thought alone is enough of a claim for a curse.

Xianle falls, Taizi Dianzia falls with it.

Hong-er realises then, that it’s all his fault.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Xie Lian can do nothing but stare in shock, directly after E-Ming had felled the spirit hellbent on ripping a hole right through his chest.

E-Ming, who had then fallen to the ground, motionless and silent where normally rampant shaking and rattles for praise would have commenced.

Despite the level of care Xie Lian has for the blade, it falls completely to the wayside in favour of the wide-eyed gaze fixed directly on the crumpled state of Hua Cheng’s robes.

(For a dreadful second all he can think of is a blizzard of silver butterflies, the horrible realisation that he had become used to the company and the care and the comfort of loving and being loved by another so completely, that he could only rationalise their connection in concluding they must have originated from the same star at their conception.)

His thoughts are interrupted by a shuffle beneath the fabric finery, or rather within it.

And suddenly a very familiar eye is staring out at him.

Familiar, because he would recognise the colour anywhere, and only familiar because absolutely nothing else about the surrounding picture is as it should be.

He’s so small.

And for the first time in all the years Xie Lian has known him, he sees actual, abstract fear.

“San Lang?”

The child seems to flinch back even further, almost disappearing into the robes once more. He shifts within the fabric, lifting a bundled hand, shrouded in a too long sleeve to slap harshly over the right side of his face.

The impact makes Xie Lian wince, and without thinking he startles forward to try to pull the hand away, inspect the area for damage and coo placatingly until he can cajole Hua Cheng into using one of his butterflies to heal himself.

The boy does not so much startle as shrink, curling his shoulders down to shield his neck and forcing the lot into the space between his stomach and his curled-up knees.

Xie Lian stops dead at the sight, pulling his outstretched hand back as if burnt.

He has never been in a situation where Hua Cheng did not reach to him, like a sunflower to the sun. He has never experienced an absence of admiration, of love, of want.

Selfishly, it stings.

He shakes his head at the thought, angry at himself. Everything Hua Cheng has sacrificed, and in a moment of reciprocal need all he can do is miss and mourn him.

Xie Lian slips to his knees before the child, trying to appear friendly and approachable and safe.

“Hong-er?”

The child peers a cautious eye out at him again, barely blinking. He does not nod, but it is confirmation enough for Xie Lian, who recognises the wide set dark eye and inky black hair. Combined with the red robes, it is like an odd amalgamation between the Hong-er of the past and the shrunken down Crimson Rain Sought Flower at the last opening of Mount Tonglu.

He does not know what has happened, but he has no doubt as to who this child is.

He is, therefore, incomparably precious.

“Do you know who I am?”

Again, there is no response given, but Xie Lian can see the confusion, the lack of recognition. He takes a deep breathe to soothe the persistent ache that brings, surprised at how spoiled he has become, to always expect Hua Cheng’s idolisation above all else.

“My name’s Xie Lian.”        

Still nothing.

That brings a furrow to Xie Lian’s brow.

It brings him no satisfaction these days to recall how his name was widely renowned throughout Xianle and the surrounding kingdoms from the very moment of his birth. It was highly unusual for there to be a person, no matter their status, who did not know of his name throughout the central plains. Hong-er was born in Xianle, Xie Lian knows that from his San Lang’s own brief recollections of his past.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Hong-er looks up at him imploringly, shielding his face further from view in the billowing red fabric of his sleeve. He opens his mouth to speak, only managing to get any words out when he is met by nothing but comfortable silence and an encouraging smile from Xie Lian.

“Mama…”

“Your Mother?”

Hong-er nods, a single downward tilt of his head.

“Were you with her?”

A single shake of his head, eye downcast with palpable misery. There begins a tremble in his lips that grows to a tremble in his shoulders and limbs, till the silver jewellery still draped over his drowned figure begins to rattle. Xie Lian must physically restrain himself from collapsing across the distance and bundling the child up for consolation.

“Dead.”

Xie Lian stares, wide eyed, as tears fall from that familiar dark eye. If any escape from the other, they are stilted by the tight pressure of his hand.

He’s completely silent.

It prickles uncomfortably against Xie Lian’s spine.

“I’m sorry Hong-er.”

Hong-er shakes his head so violently he threatens to dislodge his own hand, the placement of which prompts Xie Lian’s gaze back towards E-Ming, who remains lifeless against the stone. He sighs, surprisingly bereft, though he knows he should not be. If E-Ming is not currently active, it bears acknowledgement that given Hua Cheng’s current condition and the way he guards his right side, the lifeblood of the blade would still be a part of him.

A thoroughly hated part.

Leaning back onto his heals, Xie Lian stands briefly to reach for the discarded blade, holding it loosely in his grip in the absence of the sheath still bundled somewhere within Hua Cheng’s oversized robes.

Ruoye, sensing the opportunity to be helpful, darts out from his sleeve to wrap itself around the blade itself, seeming to sag in place as it senses the notable absence of its friend, a drooped end turning up towards Xie Lian in mourning.

“He’ll be back.” Xie Lian says, more to himself, if he’s being perfectly honest. 

When he turns back to Hong-er, he sees that the child has sat up ramrod straight at the sight of the blade, weepy eyes fixed upon it not in fright so much as resignation.

“Will it help?” Hong-er says, glancing back up at him through one big, black, endlessly sorrowful eye.

“Not now, no.” Xie Lian says with a smile. Placing the blade into his qiankun sleeve now that it is covered, taking the time to drag a soothing hand along Ruoye as he does so. “But we’ll need it for later.”

Hong-er nods, struggling up to his feet without once removing the hand covering his right eye. He wavers slightly under the weight of the too long robes, looking down at them in perplexity.

“Where are we going?”

Xie Lian is surprised that Hong-er seems so suddenly unbothered by the presence of a stranger, especially one he seemed nothing short of terrified of a sparse few moments ago. If he wasn’t so shocked by the whole scenario, he probably would have fallen into a Guoshi style lecture about the dangers of following strangers.

“We have some others to find first.” Xie Lian says, kneeling again when he realises that the child does not even reach his knees when standing, “Then we’ll head back to o- my home.”

Hong-er nods, looking to the long trail of robes around him. Dragged down by the weight, the shoulder of his outer and inner robes falls from its precarious position against his collarbone. Xie Lian catches no more than a glimpse of bony prominence and something that looks suspiciously like a burn before he must turn his head away and studiously remind himself that the causative events of this are long dead, that this suffering is long past. 

“It might be best if I carry you.” Xie Lian says, shifting forward slightly on his knees and opening his arms in invitation. “Would that be okay?”

“Carry?” Hong-er says, tilting his head slightly in confusion. “Like a basket?”

“Something like that yes.”

“…Why?”

“We might have to walk quite a way.”

Hong-er looks at his open arms dubiously, folding his own around himself. An agonising few minutes later, he nods.

Xie Lian softly lifts the child under the arms, taking a deep breath to offset the steady wave of sadness over how horrifically light he is, how sharp and painful his ribs feel against his skin. He folds his arms over his back and hips, seating the boy against his right side so he doesn’t jostle the still raised arm covering his eye as he walks. The fabric of the robes falls over his arm like a cape, almost trailing the ground even folded over as they are.

They are not walking all that long before they begin to hear commotion ahead. Hong-er, who had already been stiff and vibrating with tension against his side, ducks his head further down into the collar of his robes.

“Your Highness!” Feng Xin shouts from the tree line, followed by a harsh, audible smack of skin against cloth.

“Dumbass, why are you shouting, what if that spirit is still around?”

“Even greater reason to find His Highness!”

“You really think anything is going to get a lick on him with Crimson Rain there?”

“I didn’t realise you were such a fan of him!”

“What the hell, asshole, I can’t stand him!”

“I can’t stand you!” Accompanied by another smack, this time with a quick flick of retaliation.

Xie Lian raises his spare hand to his forehead, rubbing against the brewing headache but pushing through to send a reassuring smile in Hong-er’s direction, not that the boy is currently looking at him.

He is both so similar and dissimilar to Hua Cheng. It sends a heavy shot of longing through Xie Lian, who has had more than enough time separated from his husband. There is something so sad about this child, it zaps any bit of potential enjoyment from the situation.

“Those are the others I was talking about.” He explains, when Hong-er manages to lift his gaze enough to spot the two men finally emerging from the tree line before them.

“Feng Xin, Mu Qing, we’re over here.”

“Thank goodness, I was worried you and Hua Cheng were fuc-” Mu Qing stops as soon as he raises his gaze enough to take in the situation, looking from Xie Lian to the child bundled in his arms and back again. “What the hell?”

“What the fuck?”

“I’m not sure what happened.” Xie Lian admits, shaking his head in helplessness. “The spirit went for me, but San Lang interjected and... well…”

He waves a hand in Hong-er’s direction, assuming it is explanation enough.

“That’s Crimson Rain?!”

“Holy shit!” Feng Xin seconds, earlier indignation seeming to be almost immediately tempered by a notable level of perplexity.  “He’s so small.”

Mu Qing rolls his eyes, but also runs an appraising glance over Hong-er. “What happened to his eye, is it injured?”     

Hong-er flinches so violently at Mu Qing’s approach, Xie Lian must bring his hand higher up on his back to avoid him toppling straight out of his arms.

The automatic way Hong-er tucks his own face against Xie Lian’s neck can feel nothing like progress, not when coupled with the irrepressible shaking that seems to have taken root in every muscle fibre. When he begins to feel quickened, panicked breaths against the skin of his throat, he finally gives into the urge to gently encourage the boy to sleep. It’s a harmless magic, not usually utilised by himself, but he could not bear the sight of Hong-er’s continued fright.

“What did you do?”

“Just put him to sleep for a moment. He’s frightened. He doesn’t remember anything.” Xie Lian takes a deep, unsteady breath, hands tightening on the precious bundle in his arms. “Not even me.”

“Is that even possible?” Mu Qing says, eyebrow raised incredulously, taking another step forward to glance at the child. “Hasn’t he been obsessed with you since his first breath and all?”

“He’s so young, I don’t think he’d have met me.”

“Surely he’d recognise you, being from Xianle.” Feng Xin points out, taking a step forward himself. He jostles Mu Qing’s shoulder as he does so, nearly falling into the shrubbery at the resulting shove.

“Even if he could, I don’t exactly line up with the version of me he’d be expecting, I’d have been a child myself.”

“What do we do with it?” Mu Qing asks.

“He needs to sleep off the spell, both mine and whatever that spirit cast.” Xie Lian says, with a subtle but unavoidable look of reproach. He shuffles his frighteningly light burden further up into his arms, allowing Hong-er’s head to rest snuggly in the crook of his neck. “I’d like for him to wake up somewhere more appealing than a forest on the cusp of nightfall.”

“What spell is it?”

“How long will it last?”

“Is he a human right now?”

“Both of you, please.” Xie Lian interrupts, oblivious to the way it is his obvious exhaustion and weary concern rathe than his words, that quiet the two. “If you could draw an array to Taicang Mountain, I can contact Yin Yu to try and investigate it for me. Ling Wen might know something also.”

The two generals nod, Feng Xin stepping forward to begin formatting an array on a nearby shrine just on the border of the forest path. The job takes him out of earshot, allowing Xie Lian enough time to contact both Yin Yu and Ling Wen in their respective communication arrays.

After several moments convincing Yin Yu that Hua Cheng is fine and several more reassuring Ling Wen that he will be up to Heaven within the week to catch up on every imperial task that has been upended onto him, so long as she can attempt to uncover more about San Lang’s current affliction, it is just him, Mu Qing and Hong-er remaining.

“It’s so weird.”

“What is?”

“That.” Mu Qing says, waving offhandedly in Hong-er’s direction. “It’s so hard to even associate him with humanity in hindsight-”

“No, it isn’t.”

“For anyone except you, it really is.”

Xie Lian sighs, feeling at that moment like he will soon have no air left to expel. “Everyone was a child originally, Mu Qing. You, me, Sang Lang, even Jun Wu.”

Mu Qing sneers far more at the reminder of the past emperor then he does at the mention of Hua Cheng, another small moment of victory in Xie Lian’s eyes.

“I bet he’s a fucking hellion, given what he was like after the festival.”            

“Mu Qing.” Xie Lian admonishes gently, too tired for ribbing no matter how light-hearted.

“What?” Mu Qing says, eyes fixed over Xie Lian’s shoulder where Feng Xin is finishing up the array. “I mean nothing of it, just that you can be in charge of restraining the brat when he tries to take another chunk out of Feng Xin’s arm.”

He thinks about his sentence for a second.

“On second thought, Your Highness, kindly don’t restrain him.”

Feng Xin arrives back to the group, keeping a needlessly wide birth from Hong-er considering how deeply unconscious the boy is and the fact that he can’t weight more that 25 pounds soaking wet.

Xie Lian is inordinately grateful for the convenience of the arrays in that moment, as the first step into the familiar tranquillity of the cottage he shares with his husband works to soothe the disquiet that had settled over him since he had watched his San Lang vanish again.

Xie Lian gently lowers Hong-er onto the bed, taking care to arrange the long robes over him so they don’t become dislodged if he twists, or tighten too much against his skin. It is a simple thing to remove the too large jewellery pieces, which are placed reverently down onto their usual position on the small shrine his San Lang had insisted on constructing here.

(In all actuality he had insisted on an adjoining room completely dedicated to worship and had settled on a small shrine beside the bed at Xie Lian’s persistent mortification).

The thought made him smile; it made him ache.

He truly has become spoiled.

Xie Lian turns away from Hong-er, watching the two Generals of the South shuffling from foot to foot beside him. They are obviously unsettled, and if Xie Lian wasn’t himself, he’d find it amusing. No matter what anyone thinks of him, Hua Cheng is not synonymous with fragility.

Only Xie Lian had observed the quiet undercurrent of insecurity, the way it crests and waves when no one is around to see it. Only he had witnessed the rampant self-destruction, the proclivity to self-soothe with self-mutilation, the nagging undercurrent of ‘less-than’ huddled beneath layers and layers of confidence and competency.

Hua Cheng would hate to be seen like this. Would consider this even worse than the form he had taken for the forceful suppression of his unstable energy.

“He’s so small.”

“We heard you the first time, idiot.” Mu Qing says, crossing his arms over his chest with an (admittedly half-hearted) glare Feng Xin’s way. “Do something useful and see if the villagers have any children’s robes.”

“Who died and made you emperor?”

“Of for fuck’s sa-”

“Both of you, please stop shouting.” Xie Lian says, holding up both of his palms towards each of their chests. He throws a glance back at Hong-er, turning back to them both with resignation. “I’ll go.”

“You can’t.” Mu Qing says, much to Xie Lian’s surprise. “He doesn’t know either of us. I didn’t know many street kids who would take well to waking up in an unknown place surrounded by strangers.”

“I’ll just go.” Feng Xin mutters, stepping back through the cottage door to begin the mild trek down to the village. At least given everything that happened with Cuo Cuo, Xie Lian can be reasonably sure that Feng Xin knows what type of robes to be looking for.

Mu Qing takes an unprompted step towards where Hong-er is settled onto the bed, raising a hand in a small wave of spiritual energy. Despite all that has been done to rectify their relationship, Xie Lian cannot help the instinctual urge to step in-between the two of them, as if to deflect an attack or take it on himself instead. Mu Qing’s frown could be considered nothing more than annoyed if it wasn’t also for the nearly indiscernible flare of age-old mourning. The quiet knowledge that scars, regardless of healing, do not move as freely as unmarred skin.

The moment is enough for Xie Lian to acknowledge the spell as a harmless one, more of an observational tool than anything, simple enough and designed for nothing more than examination of ailments to physical condition or spiritual energy.

“Is he okay?” Xie Lian asks, once Mu Qing has had a chance to check, and has instead taken a hold of Hong-er’s wrist.

“Hmm.” Mu Qing starts, swapping his hand to feel the other wrist as well. “He’s too thin, and he probably has a right orbital fracture at least, possibly a rib or two but it’s hard to tell with him being so small. He’s also got a heartbeat, so technically, he’s a hell of a lot better than normal.”

“Do you know what caused this?”

“I thought you were asking Waning Moon and Lin Weng?” Mu Qing says, letting go of the wrist in his hand and watching it fall back to the bed limply. Despite this, he takes a breath and shrugs his shoulders. “His meridians are fine; I doubt it’s a curse. Probably just a wayward spell, his spiritual energy would have counteracted any nefarious intentions which probably resulted in the spell backfiring to this. Spells don’t tend to stick to Ghost Kings.”

Mu Qing glances back at Xie Lian, taking note of the way he worries his bottom lip between his teeth, the gentle furrow of his eyebrows.

He takes him by the elbow, gentle, directing him to sit in a chair to the side of the bed rather than standing guard next to it.

“Which means he’ll be fine, and probably back to normal in a couple of days maximum.”

“Thank you, Mu Qing.”

Mu Qing takes a seat on the arm of the chair, his elbow just brushing against Xie Lian’s shoulder with the advantage of height this position gives him. He glances back over to the child on the bed, remembering a similar picture falling from the sky, how Xie Lian’s beautiful robes had fluttered in the wind created by his leap, how easily he’d fought with a child secured in his arms, face bared for the public to the rumbustious joy of the crowd.

He’s even younger than he was then. How does a ten-year-old come to fall of a wall that high? Even the internal walls guarding the edge from the public would have taken some climbing.

“Loathe as I am to admit it, Feng Xin was right, he is incredibly small.”

“He’s never told me much about his childhood.” Xie Lian admits, pulling a small scrap of skin from his lip until it blooms red across his mouth, almost like a lip stain. “What he has alluded to wasn’t very pleasant.”

“What did he say when you found him?”

“Not a lot.” Xie Lian says, before remembering the only prudent thing that was volunteered. “He told me his mother was dead.”

“Hmm.”

Mu Qing falls quiet, battling with the quiet determination of someone who refuses to relate to an individual they have a strong and mutually upheld dislike to. Regardless, there is a brewing sympathy for any child suffering the premature loss of a parent. He thinks back to a child that determined himself homeless, and wondered if this was a presiding factor of that statement. Goodness knows Mu Qing’s own home had paled after his mother’s death, like the life of it was leeched in parallel to her own.

The steady silence has not long fallen before the sound of shuffling from the bed draws their attention.

Hong-er’s left side is facing them as his eyes flutter open, one dark eye visible for less than a second before a hand is coming up to clasp over the right one. Only then does he turn his head.

He sits up when he sees them, a stilted motion with only one hand available and heavy robes still proving more a hindrance than anything else. He does not seem nearly as timid as Xie Lian has observed earlier, but there is something off about his disposition, something defeated and tired in the tilt of his head and the half lidded, fretful gaze of his dark eye.

He doesn’t speak, just takes a singular glance around the room, before sitting very quiet and very still.

“Right.” Mu Qing says, when that appears to be all their getting. “Well, I was honestly expecting a fight, so I suppose this at least, is turning out for the better.”

“Hong-er?” Xie Lian asks, turning more fully in his chair to face the child directly. “How are you feeling?”

“Did you hurt your eye?” Mu Qing starts, before Hong-er can even think to open his mouth in denial or confirmation of the first question.

Hong-er’s fingers curl slightly into the flesh beneath his hand, tiny red crescents blooming and fading away as he stretches the hand flat again. He doesn’t say anything to this question either, regardless of the expectant silence that falls over the room. Even his breathing is silent, in a way that is usually a comfort to Xie Lian, given his association with San Lang.

For a small child, who for all intents and purposes is very much mortal, it is nothing short of disconcerting.

Mu Qing shoots a look over to Xie Lian, who can do little more than raise his shoulders in a defeated shrug. He feels so unbalanced by this, in a way he never expected to feel towards any incarnation of Hua Cheng. He is unsure whether the disorientation arises from the fact that this is his San Lang, acting completely out of character, or the steady acknowledgement that this behaviour is unusual for any child.

“Okay…” Xie Lian says, shifting to lean forward slightly on his chair, trying to eliminate as much of the height disparity as he can.  “Are you hungry?”

Hong-er remains silent, and Xie Lian is unsure whether any of the small movements of his head are intended to be answers or just subconscious anxiety given form. He begins to wonder if the spell he cast on Hong-er had more side effects then he was aware of, and this fatigued disposition and stilted interaction is simply a result of it.

“Thirsty?” He tries again.

“Capable of speech?” Mu Qing drawls, leaning back on his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. Xie Lian doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he must have subconsciously adopted that posture from Hua Cheng, nor the time to consider such similarities, given that Hong-er finally raises his head enough for them to see his lips move.

“…I can talk.”

“Bravo.” Mu Qing quips, with a slow accompanying clap. Once again, Xie Lian has no intention of telling him, but this too is a very familiar action he seems to have picked up from Hua Cheng. “Who would have thought he’d be this quiet. Small and quiet suits him.”

Behind his back, Hong-er’s eyes fall to the bed, shoulders hunching in even further than they had before.

Xie Lian frets quietly with his hands, feeling once again unsettled by his disparity at how best to handle this situation.  It should be straightforward, should be easy. He knows Hua Cheng. He adores children. Why then, is this situation managing to wrong foot him so consistently, that he has been unable to even pry a single smile from the boy, a single word of familiarity. He feels this an opportunity to offer comfort to someone deserving but denied, and he is failing in the only opportunity he may ever have to right the past actions he now knows as wrong.

(A painfully thin, bloody, and bruised child, sobbing into his robes with enough force to shake his scapula, his ribs, his vertebrae. The way his Guoshi spit curses and fables at something already so brokenly resigned to misery. The horrible realisation of someone immortalised and gilded in gold, that suffering could be severe enough to inspire suicidality in a child, a baby. A child, with no name, no home, no hope. Just hate, internalised and brandished like a blade.)

“How about I make you some food?” He suggests, standing from his seat, his tense hands falling to his sides to avoid such an obvious show of insecurity.

“How about I make him some food.” Mu Qing interjects, a hand as his shoulder to (gently) force him back into his chair, flicking a faintly silver lock of dark hair over his shoulder to paint the show of care in an appropriate layer of indifference. “Lest you kill the lot of us.”

He moves to the small kitchen area of the cottage, nothing more than a wide doorway between the two rooms. He begins his preparations quietly enough that the silence lingering in the living chambers prompt Xie Lian’s hands back together, once again wringing in concern.

Hong-er hasn’t moved since he roused, hand still firmly held to the right side of his face. If Xie Lian looks closely, he thinks he can see the minor worrying of teeth against the inside of the child’s lip, and though it shouldn’t be reassuring, the synchronicity of their disquiet reminds him that he is the adult in this situation, far older than a naïve 17 year old prince, who did not yet know such an unusual extremity of suffering when it was crumpled against his robes.

“Do you remember me?” He asks when he catches the barest hint of a dark eye flashed in his direction.

“…Xie Lian.” Hong-er murmurs, and it is both beautiful and horrible to hear his name from such a familiar place. It rings with the echo of lovelier monikers. Gege and beloved and husband. 

“That’s right!” Xie Lian says, deciding to take progress for what it is with a smile he hopes is reassuring rather than sad. He hesitates for a second, biting against his own lip to try and fight back the regular impulses that long for familiarity, that beg for an advance on an opportunity not yet taken. He loses the battle for restraint, as freshly spoiled things do.  “If you want, you can call me Gege.”

Hong-er shakes his head so suddenly and violently even Mu Qing startles from his position by the stove, catching the frantic movement in his peripheral vision. Xie Lian tries not to feel hurt by the immediate rebuttal, part of him longing for the familiar and endeared terminology, his name sounds so foreign to him most days, let alone from someone so predisposed to terms of endearment in his usual form.

“It’s not good.” Hong-er says, maybe the loudest sound he’s made since this all began.

Xie Lian blinks in confusion. (And hurt, that damnable selfish ache.)

“Not good?”

“Bad luck.” Hong-er says, with such a forceful shove to his own chest Xie Lian worries anew over his painfully exposed ribs. “Bad things happen.”

“Well if that isn’t the freakiest little fortune I’ve ever heard.” Mu Qing says, almost offhandedly if not for the sideways gaze he is casting at the child, frown less agitated than Xie Lian would expect from him.

Mu Qing looks away again almost as quickly as he gaze was drawn. As such, he takes no notice of the heavy flinch that arises from his tone, his words. Xie Lian, who is watching far more closely than Mu Qing ever would, doesn’t miss a thing, frowning heavily at the association.

Whatever small level of confidence Xie Lian had managed to fumble together had been shattered anew at the rebuttal. He knows it to be stupid, but he cannot circumnavigate the knowledge that this is his San Lang, against the actuality of him being a child who knows nothing of him. He cannot stop expecting familiarity where there is only fear, confirmation where there is only confusion. He is waiting for responses that the child cannot hope to compose, feelings that are nothing but inappropriate to one so young.

Xie Lian is intimately familiar with wounds to the heart; he will never admit to San Lang being the only person who could prompt this level of horrible heartache.

Within far less time that Xie Lian would have taken to produce something much less edible, Mu Qing has plated and deposited a relatively simple congee into three bowels (a fourth covered and not so subtly left beside the stove to further hold its warmth). Xie Lian decides it best not to encourage Hong-er to the table, unwilling to risk what reaction would be prompted with more forceful proximity and mindful of his very dubious manoeuvrability in the oversized robes still shrouding his frame.

Instead, he passes a bowl to the boy, careful to make sure the edges and base are not too hot for such small, delicate fingers and that the weight is not too much for such fragile, birdlike wrists.

Hong-er takes the bowl with a dubious perplexity, the worrying of his lip more obvious. He rests it in his lap but makes no move to eat it. Xie Lian says nothing, sending what he hopes is a meaningful glance to Mu Qing when he notices the others lips part in preparation for speech. He takes a bite of his own congee, praising Mu Qing on the flavour he created with the limited ingredients available to him and hoping the lack of outright observation and mutual participation of a meal will encourage Hong-er to eat himself.

Mu Qing himself takes a bite, rolling his eyes away from Hong-er with a huff.

“Eat it kid.” He says eventually, when half of their own meal is gone and Hong-er has yet to take a bite.

The child lowers his eyes to the bowl, then obeys.

He eats very slowly for someone so obviously starved, timid and tense; he has barely made a dent before it seems as though he is forcing more than is comfortable.

“You don’t have to eat it all.” Xie Lian says, showing the parts left in his own bowl as example.

Hong-er puts the bowl back into his lap, holding its edge with a trembling hand, visibly the most conflicted Xie Lian has seen him. The Xie Lian that knows hunger intimately understands, the way that all prey animals and peasants do, the desperate need to eat whatever is available whenever it is available, lest is be stolen by others or lost to rot. Mu Qing, similarly, knows enough about hunger to keep his quips to himself. 

“You can keep it.” Xie Lian says, as he stands up to clear his own bowl away. “There’s even spare if you want me to heat it later.”    

Hong-er looks to the bowl, hand shaking so hard the one over his eye flinches as if to steady it before he remembers himself.  “What’s in it?”

“It’s congee.” Mu Qing says, with an eye roll. “So, rice, stock, some herbs.”

Hong-er bites his lip so hard it blooms into redness, just shy of breaking the skin. The hand gripping the bowel retreats to his robes, balanced in the curve of his folded legs. He raises his left to cover over his right, and only once they are fully overlapping does he remove the one that has been placed there since he awoke. It falls into his lap against the bowl, the limb shaking with fatigue at being forced into one raised position for so long.

“What’s up with the eye?”

Hong-er falls eerily silent and still once again, leaving Mu Qing to heave himself up from his seat with a huff of indignation. He seems to fall into these moments, adopting an almost statuesque level of stillness, still enough that even the frustrated extension of Mu Qing’s hand towards him prompts nothing more than a sharp little intake of breath.

“Show me.”

Xie Lian opens his mouth to stop Mu Qing’s insistences, only stopped when he considers the possibility that Hong-er could very well be hiding an injury. Xie Lian had not seen more than a bright flash of light when the spirt collided with Hua Cheng that morning, there is every possibility that Hua Cheng’s firm determination to avoid Xie Lian being hit had left enough of a hole in his own defence to fail in avoiding a strike.

“Hong-er, if it’s hurt you have to let us look so we can fix it.” Xie Lian says, annoyed at himself for not thinking to check the eye while Hong-er was still asleep. He knows checking these things with spiritual energy alone is not infallible, certainly not for something so delicate.

“Suit yourself.” Mu Qing says, when the seconds pass and Hong-er makes no indication of moving. “Not like the damn thing will be much use to you in the future.”

Hong-er flinches, one of those obviously violent ones Xie Lian is beginning to attribute to the way one defends from a physical strike. There is a very particular pattern to his reactions, to what makes the careful stillness crack. Xie Lian feels as if his lips are permanently pulled down into a frown. He had wanted this to be a happy experience, and he had yet to manage a single thing that prompted anything other than further discomfort and fear.

“Mu Qing.” He scolds gently, for he also understands the reason for Mu Qing’s harsh tone, his cutting words. “Stop.”

“Yes Mu Qing, stop.” Feng Xin echos, entering back through the cottage door as if he has always been part of the conversation. “Stop pissing off His Highness.”

“With pleasure.” Mu Qing huffs, crossing his arms back over his chest with an upward flay of his chin. “You manage to piss him off plenty enough for the both of us.”

“Can we not do this the whole evening?” Xie Lian asks, his budding headache prompting a hand back up to rub between his eyes. 

Blissfully, the two gods fall silent, turning away from each other with an audible huff.

“I bought the robes, Your Highness.” Feng Xin says, placing the small pile beside Xie Lian on the table. “I think they’ll still be a little big, but it was the best I could do given the time.”

“They’re wonderful, thank you Feng Xin.” Xie Lian takes the pile into his own arms, riffling through them quickly. He finds a particular prominent red and cannot go further. Despite himself, he picks the bright fabric from the pile, folding it neatly over his arm and selecting a black inner robe and pants alongside.

“Hong-er?” Xie Lian asks, kneeling before the child and opening his arms once again. He readjusts his approach, aware that his previous questions have been met with little more than silence, dubiousness, or anxiety. “I’d like to take a bath, how about you join me, and we can get you changed into some robes that fit?”

Hong-er looks from Xie Lian to the two gods at his back. He looks between the two of them for a moment longer, and Xie Lian tries not to feel too satisfied when he obviously deems Xie Lian to be the more favourable option. He is no burden at all in Xie Lian’s arms as he is scooped up again, and Xie Lian feels the first smile of the event ease onto his face at the show of trust that comes from a thin arm twined under his own, rested gently on his shoulder.

“Mu Qing left you some congee Feng Xin.” He calls as he walks through to the newly installed bathroom Hua Cheng has insisted on once his original shrine idea was vetoed. “It should still be warm so eat up while we’re gone.”

“Who said it was for him!” Mu Qing shouts, hooking a finger into the back of Feng Xin’s robes to hold him back from walking to the kitchen for the bowl.

“Oh, was it for Hong-er?”

“No! It was…” Mu Qing tapers off as he spots Xie Lian smile over his shoulder, his own face falling in aggrieved resignation. He lets go of Feng Xin with an irritable push in the direction of the kitchen. “Whatever, just fucking eat it while it’s hot, idiot.”

Xie Lian smiles at the minor squabbling despite himself, tightening his hold on Hong-er as he bends to place the small pile of robes against a low bench by the doorway. He pulls a clean set of his own from the shelf, alongside a towel for each of them. He sends a heartfelt thank you to his version of San Lang, who, upon his return, had spent an inordinate amount of his newly replenished energy and no small amount of manual labour rediverting a nearby hot spring to feed the bath.

Normally not one for such indulgences, Xie Lian must admit to its relative ease, and comparable comfort to the longwinded transfer of water from the river. The arduous process of manual transport and heating of the water had once been a comfort, a semi frequent way to waste away some of the endless hours of solitude and silence.

Nowadays, bathing is a pleasant thing, warmed and accompanied as he often is. There are few things Xie Lian treasures more than the mutuality of washing his husband and being washed in turn, selecting fragrances and oils to run them over hair and skin again and again until they are sleepy or stimulated enough for bed.

He cuts off that train of thought quickly, currently his husband is in no state to be subjected to such thoughts. In lots of ways this feels more like being a spoiled infant again, too young to have been appointed Mu Qing as a personal attendant, refusing the help of his bath maids and fussing until he would be swept up by his mother to join her own bath.

“Hong-er.” Xie Lian says, as he places the boy down beside the shallow drop edge of the bath. “Do you want to go first, second or together?”

Hong-er doesn’t answer, eyes fixed onto the steam raising up from the water, the way it dances in the gentle breeze supplied from the still open door. Xie Lian watches, quietly, as he edges a wary hand out towards the steam, thin fingers just brushing the edge of a curled tendril before darting back into the cover of robes, clutched up against his chest. The other hand, still fixed to his face, curls slightly against his head.

“Warm.” Hong-er says, very quiet and very small.

Xie Lian smiles.

‘Thank you, San Lang.’

“Should we bathe together?” Xie Lian says, shuffling forward a little so he will be at the right distance to help Hong-er with the tangle of his robes. “I can wash your hair if you’d like?”

Hong-er stiffens, but nods, making no move to edge away as Xie Lian pulls off the first layer of cloth. They come to a problem when Hong-er's persistency at keeping his hand firmly clasped to his head limits his ability to remove the robes. He bites his lip, loathe to cut them. Hong-er seems to have noticed the problem also but continues to keep his hand firmly pressed to his face.

“Hong-er.” Xie Lain says, gently. “Could you let go for just a moment?”

Hong-er shakes his head. Shakes all over when Xie Lian just continues to look at him.

“Why not sweetheart?”

“It’s bad.”            

“That’s not true.”

“It is.” Hong-er insists, ducking his head and folding away like an origami crane caught in a rainstorm.

Xie Lian runs a nervous tongue over his lips in contemplation, he wants to do something more than placate, wants to take the boy, and remove any shred of worry or insecurity over something Xie Lian has long since learned to love, if not in this form than an arguably much more insistent one. Even as he knows him now, San Lang is so unfathomably blind to himself, it is probably the closest similarity between the two interpretations that Xie Lian has noticed.

“Hong-er.” He says, carefully, for he knows he does not have the time with this version that would be needed to assuage fears. “I won’t look, how about that?”

“I’m not stupid.” Hong-er says, any harshness that could have been interpreted from the words dampened with a damp misery, almost a whine, almost a plea. “Everyone always says that.”

And they lie - is what Xie Lian can interpret from that. Wondering how many times a child must be tricked to expect it above all sincerity. It makes him wonder how many times Hong-er tried, how many times he trusted, before he realised the reaction was never going to be different.

What was the price of hope? How many times was it paid?

Xie Lian shifts, intending to reach into his own sleeve. Hong-er must see the movement as a prelude to a grab if not an attack, as he falls back onto his heels so quickly, he scarcely avoids falling completely. Xie Lian freezes in place, raising his other hand as placatingly as he is able.

“Please don’t.” Hong-er whispers, flinching back even further at the raised hand.

“I won’t sweet boy, I won’t do that.” Xie Lian says, neither falling back or moving forward. Everything within him begs to console, his arms ache to hold, practically shaking with restraint. “Will you let me wrap it?”

Hong-er bites at his lower lip, worrying the inner edge, he looks back to the bath. “They’ll get wet.”

“Not this one.” Xie Lian says, with a smile as he resumes reaching into his sleeve, rummaging until he can find the edge of E-Ming’s lifeless hilt. “Can I show you?”

Hong-er nods, raising his head just slightly in the smallest show of inquisition.

“Ruoye.” Xie Lian calls, smiling as the ribbon shimmies its way out from his sleeve from its position still shrouding E-Ming’s blade.

As if recognising it has been called in exhibition, Ruoye dances up to the ceiling of the bathing room, trailing around it’s edges like a dragon as it wafts through the steam surrounding it. Though initially startled, Xie Lian smiles to note that Hong-er flinches towards him rather than away at the new inclusion to the room, a tiny hand coming to rest against his sleeve.

“Come Ruoye, say hello.”

Ruoye of course, is overjoyed by the command, always more than happy to greet someone Xie Lian views so very favourably. If it notices anything amiss about the much smaller entity it flutters around, it makes no indication of it in its movements, flurrying around Hong-er’s hair and robes in the exact same way it always greets Hua Cheng.

Hong-er’s eye is so wide his brow has near merged into the edge of his fringe.

“This is Ruoye, Hong-er.” Xie Lian explains, raising a hand to let a curled end dance between his fingers. “It’s very friendly.”

To those I like.

“What is it?”

“Umm.” Xie Lian says, faltering in his explanation, knowing the truth is not the most reassuring of things to name. “A.. spirit of sorts, I suppose.”

“Oh.” Hong-er says, not seeming to notice the indignant flick of Ruoye’s end towards Xie Lian’s hand at the misdemeanour. 

“I mainly wear it around my wrist. Though I used to wear it around my neck, when I had something there that I didn’t want anyone to see.” Xie Lian explains, raising a hand to his neck as if in demonstration. “It’s really very good at covering things.”

“Can it see?”

“Not see, no.” Xie Lian says. “I suppose it is more like one complete sense it has, rather than sight and smell and hearing that we have. It can feel, and I can feel it, but that’s the extent of it.”

“It can’t speak?”

“Not in words no. I can tell when it’s hurt, or happy. It’s happy to meet you.”

As if in demonstration, Ruoye winds closer to Hong-er’s head, wiggling until it can ease an end under the tight clasp of his hand. It winds round until it has successfully shrouded the right side of Hong-er’s head, giving a singular happy shuffle before falling still again.

Hong-er’s hand is slow to drop, Xie Lian’s own wastes no time in wriggling the now freed arm through the robes until he can release them to pool in a pile behind them. He follows again with the inner robe, stopping just long enough to fold both. They are some of his favourites that Hua Cheng wears after all.

(He tries very hard not to think too much about how painful the human skeleton looks when there is no flesh to shield it. How Hong-er’s shoulder blades pierce his skin like wings, his vertebrae a xylophone of sharp bone and flesh pulled so taught it looks translucent. The way his arms are small enough that Xie Lian fears to grip him, lest the birdlike disposition extend to hollowness and fragility. He has the characteristic pressure sores Xie Lian is more used to seeing on the elderly, those who’s bones seem to already be pulling them down to the grave from all the weight gravity exerts on them.)

Xie Lian turns away to untie his own robes, folding them far less neatly than Hua Cheng’s own and placing them on the bench also. His fingers absentmindedly fiddle with the ring as he checks the temperature of the bathwater, satisfied that it is not too hot for a child, but pleasantly warm on the skin.

“Do you want to go in first?” Xie Lian says to Hong-er, adding a few drops of lavender oil to the water from the small collection of bottles against the wall.

“It’s warm.” Hong-er says, without having touched the water at all.

Xie Lian hums.

“It is.” He sits up on his heels when the child makes no move to step forward. “How about I go first and help you in?”

He is already lowering a leg into the water as he says so, following with the other until his entire lower half is covered by the water. He is glad he has considered this, in hindsight he is not sure Hong-er could touch the floor even in this shallowest area, and no doubt the child has never had opportunity to learn how to swim. Xie Lian quickly ducks his entire height into the water, wetting his hair until he can slick it back from his face, if he sneaks a small kiss to the ring while he is under the shroud of the water, no one needs to know.

He rises back to the surface, stepping forward and holding his arms open for Hong-er.

“I’ll help you, it’s not too deep but best to stay close.”

Hong-er takes a step forward, until Xie Lian can fold his small hand into one of his own. He grips a hand around Hong-er’s waist, settling him down into the water at the shallowest point, sinking down to his own knees so they can be of equal height. Hong-er can only just reach the bottom with the very tips of his toes, so Xie Lian keeps a buoyant grip just below his shoulder blades.

Hong-er looks confused by the whole thing.

“It’s warm.” He says again, like he is stuck on the words.

Xie Lian smiles. “It is.”

“Why?”

“Is it nice?”

Hong-er nods, dragging a small hand through the water and watching as it ripples under the movement. The lavender oil has tinted the water ever so slightly lilac, made the surface opaque, his hand pulls a line of clarity through the cloud of it. He seems entranced by the feeling, by the sight and smells of it all. It reminds Xie Lian of the first time he bathed at Paradise Manor, overwhelmed, and overjoyed and overstimulated all at once.

“Then that’s reason enough.” He says, selecting a few bottles of oil and a bar of soap from the line up on the nearest ledge.

He is not sure whether Hong-er skin is as fragile as it looks, but he selects the softest scents accordingly, not wanting to prompt any irritation. He must physically redirect his hand from reaching for the usual red spider lily fragrance he usually favours for San Lang. “How does Hong-er usually bathe?”

“It rains.” The child says, with a shrug that tries for indifference and falls at shame.         

“Isn’t there a bath house in the village?”

Hong-er ducks his head. “I’m not supposed to go.”

“What about school?” Xie Lian says, placing his selection to their side and beginning to dampen the edges of Hong-er’s hair. He tries to offset the frown pulling at his lips.

“Mama’s – Mama was ill.”

“Did you look after her?”

“En.” Hong-er says, raising his head only when prompted by Xie Lian to tilt it back. “You need to watch for the up and down.”

Xie Lian hums, using the conversation to gently trickle water over the top of Hong-er’s head, making sure to press a hand to the edge of his hairline to catch any wayward trickles. Ruoye flaps an end towards any he misses, mainly the ones that trail down Hong-er’s temples and ears.

“I know... I know I wasn’t good.” Hong-er says, eye falling so low in sadness it appears almost shut. “I made her sick.”

“It sounds like she was sick already sweetheart.” Xie Lian says, rubbing a thumb against his temple soothingly. He grabs for the soap, lathering some up into enough of a bubble to run it through the child’s dampened hair. “I’m sure you helped her a lot.”

Hong-er doesn’t say anything, though it is clear from his expression he does not believe it. Ruoye trembles slightly against his head, an attempt at a soothing motion that confuses Xie Lian for a minute before he notices the eerily silent tears dripping down already damp cheeks.

Thinking of the conditions under which a child adopts the need to cry in complete silence make Xie Lian angrier than he has been in many centuries, and he must look away to try and forcibly calm down, lest the veritable pit of residual fury he always carries with him attempts to surface from its steady lockdown.

It is just long enough for Xie Lian to have rinsed a round of soap and oil from Hong-er’s hair that he realises the boy has deteriorated from silent misery to obvious discomfort. He is twisting his hands beneath the water, seeming to intermittently dig his nails into the palms before twisting them round and repeating the motion.

Xie Lian takes them into his own.

“What’s wrong, Hong-er?”

The boy glances up at him miserably, flicking his eyes to the still opened doorway where the faint sounds of Mu Qing and Feng Xin’s bickering still fluctuate from barely audible to unavoidable. Xie Lian can see San Lang in the sad slope of his brow, the downward tilt of his eye, the gentle purse to his lip. It reminds him of how often San Lang is sad, how much of his life has been misery and misfortune. His comparable luck in later life must seem almost like a mockery to him when he thinks too much about it.

“Why am I still here?” Hong-er says at last, soft enough to emulate the ripples that form along the water with his breath.

“There’s quite a lot going on at the moment, but we’ll get you where you need to go soon, okay?” Xie Lian says, rubbing his thumbs against the back of Hong-er’s hands. “All you need to do is wait.”     

“It’s worse to wait.” Hong-er says, with a nod that is heavy with resignation. “Is that the point?”

“The point of what?” Xie Lian asks, something uncomfortable and concerned curling in the pit of his stomach, chasing away the slow building fury like it had never been brewing in the first place.

“Of dying?” Hong-er says, on a weary outward breath.

Xie Lian goes so still it startles Ruoye, prompting the loose, trailing edge to curl just once around his wrist in concern.

“…What do you mean?”

Hong-er’s shoulder sink beneath the water, his neck tucking into the sharp curve of his collarbones as if protecting it from a blow. “When you picked up the sword, you said you’d need it later.” Hong-er shrugs his shoulders just slightly, too heavy a motion to come off as careless. “I haven’t fought, you could’ve just done it…”

He falls quiet, and Xie Lian knows this is his opportunity to jump in with platitudes, with reassurances, but he feels stuck still where he is. Something about the whole conversation isn’t adding up to him. He can’t fathom how the only part of this whole encounter he was feeling positive about has suddenly become so morbid.

“I’m…” Hong-er takes a deep breath. His exhale shudders. Xie Lian can see that one of his ribs is fractured as it presses to his skin. “I’m tired.”

“Of what?” Xie Lian asks.

“Waiting.”

“For what?” Xie Lian asks again, feeling slow and stupid in equal measure.

“You to kill me.”

It takes Xie Lian a couple of steady blinks for that to register. When it does, he practically falls back into the water himself. His eyes are so wide he must look mad, and the small glance Hong-er risks towards him is quickly diverted back to the water’s surface.

He’s bought another hand up to his right eye, even though Ruoye still covers it.

“WHAT?” Xie Lian says, too loudly, offhandedly noticing the way the low-level bickering in the next room comes to an abrupt halt. The two generals make no move to enter the room, but he can tell they are poised to do so. He takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself down, bringing the hand not still supporting Hong-er to his face to wipe at the quiet display of agony he can feel creeping onto it.

Hong-er wrings his hand against Ruoye. “The man's mentioned it before.”

“Hang on, no.” Xie Lian says, pressing the heel of his hand into his eyes until he sees stars. “No, no, that’s not-” He shakes his head.

Hong-er shrinks far enough away that he dislodges Xie Lian’s hand, only managing to keep buoyant due to Ruoye’s quick tightening around the grip on Xie Lian’s wrist. Xie Lian pulls him further to the shallow end, prompting him to stand against the raised edge of his own knees where he is still knelt.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out and repeats. He places both his hands onto Hong-er’s small shoulders. He tries to channel calmness, composure, reaching to the words he needs to provide comfort.

“How could you think that?!” He says, far louder than he was intending. He can hear the scrapes of chairs as Mu Qing and Fen Xing make to enter and has to quickly dislodge a hand to send them a quiet plea to stay out in their array.

“I don’t mind.” Hong-er says, shrinking his shoulders away from the contact. He seems to settle into some odd amalgamation of acceptance and placation. “If it will help, I don’t mind.”

“Help what?” Xie Lian says, feeling miles away from a manageable situation.

I want San Lang. He thinks, thoughtless and selfish. The reality of it nearly brings tears to his eyes. He must work very hard not to slap himself. San Lang is here he thinks to himself. He is here and he needs you and all you can wish for is the version of him that is never obviously sad enough to prompt comfort, the one who denies it even if it is offered.

“Everything.” Hong-er says, so, so quietly. He raises his head up, just barely, a hint of eye contact before they dart back to the water. “I don’t mind. Mama might be waiting.”

“Hong-er no.” Xie Lian says, shaking his head in emphasis or pure helplessness. “We’re here to protect you.”

Hong-er does not look to him, but Xie Lian can gauge his incredulousness from the steep curve of his inwardly turned shoulders.

“We’re from the Heavenly Court.” Xie Lian says, fighting to keep his voice light and buoyant, the unsteady stillness that has fallen over the cottage itching at his skin like a poison. “Do you know what that is?”

“I don’t like gods.” Hong-er says, eyes too fixed on the water to see the way that statement makes Xie Lian himself flinch. In no ways an easy feat, considering everything.

Xie Lian takes a deep breath, forcibly relaxing his own shoulders from their defensive shrug.

“Why is that Hong-er?”

Hong-er pauses for a moment, biting at an emerging sore on his lower lip. “They don’t listen.”          

“Of course, they do, that’s the point of prayer.” Xie Lian insists, daring to move a hand into the edge of Hong-er’s eyesight to gauge his response.

“No.” Hong-er says, watching the hand ripple the water, seemingly resigned to whatever could come of the movement. He shrugs his shoulders. “You need offerings.”

Xie Lian’s face falls even further, thinking of all the times he himself had acknowledges the irony of needing to procure things from nothing to beg for the bare minimum of assistance. How Gods sit in their gilded palaces, requesting incense and lanterns and fruits that they did not need, for the often-unfulfilled promise of a jewelled ear momentarily tilted in acknowledgment to a desperate mortal, occasionally granting a wish simply to keep the hope high and the faith fruitful.

Hong-er is not wrong.

“Hong-er, please, we’re not going to kill you.” Xie Lian says, moving his hands to lay flat up on the water in offering. “Let’s get out of the bath and into bed, it’s already late. I’m sure everything will be better in the morning.”

The child says nothing, but obediently places his hands into Xie Lian’s own, allowing himself to be lifted from the water, towel dried and fitted into the red robes Feng Xin had found for him. Xie Lian is careful to wrap the bandage back around Hong-er right side, allowing Ruoye to shimmy out from under it once fitted, flittering around Hong-er one more time before looping back around Xie Lian’s own arm.

Hong-er glances down at the fabric one he is dressed and the bandages have been correctly refitted, a little frown furrowing his brows. Xie Lian, busy with arranging his own robes properly, does not notice, having pulled Hong-er’s hand to his own to lead him from the room before the fiddling can continue.

Mu Qing and Feng Xin are uncharacteristically quiet, seeming to not really know where to look or what to say. It is one of the few times that Xie Lian has missed their bickering, if only for the distraction of it.

With nothing else to do, Xie Lian directs Hong-er back to the bed mat, making a mental note to heat up the remaining congee in the boy’s bowl before he gets him to sleep. Hong-er’s hand stays gripped into his own, the other fiddling restlessly against the fabric of the robes he has been dressed in.

Xie Lian, seeing this in his peripheral vision, diverts his attention back to the child.

“Is something wrong Hong-er?”

Hong-er shakes his head, fist creasing and releasing the fabric under his hand.

“Is something wrong with the robes?” Xie Lian asks, sitting himself down on the bed mat so he can be eye to eye with Hong-er, who has settled for watching Mu Qing and Feng Xin shuffle awkwardly behind him.

Another shake, a bitten lip. “…They’re fine.”

Xie Lian smiles, rubbing his thumb over the back of the boy’s hand in encouragement. “You don’t need to lie; you can tell me whatever is wrong.”

Hong-er fumbles for a second, words seemingly posed on the tip of his tongue.

“…It’s red.” He admits at last, voice cracked in the middle with his obvious indecision to voice anything at all.

“Do you like it?” Xie Lian tries, fumbling even now for familiarity, though he can predict the answer before it is given.

Hong-er seems for freeze for a second, not knowing how to respond, before he shakes his head and grips a harsh hand into the fabric. Xie Lian has no doubt that if it was solely his decision the child would have already ripped the robes from himself.

Mu Qing opens his mouth, no doubt ready to quip about the ungratefulness of the statement. Xie Lian sends him a frigid look, pushed to the limit of his usually immeasurable patience. He is more on edge then he can ever remember being, feeling wrong footed and unprepared. He has not felt so unbalanced in a long time, and after a prolonged time of comfort and mutual understanding with another, having so many of his inscrutable facts challenged is making his limbs quake with discomfort.

“Then we will change them.” Xie Lian says, with a smile to mask his shaky exhale. “How about the black ones?”

Eventually, Xie Lian manages to get Hong-er changed and settled, pulling one of his own white robes over him like a blanket.

He is exhausted, and he must look it as he glances up towards Mu Qing and Feng Xin, still standing like awkward guardians behind him. It is odd that they have nothing to say, being as vocal as they normally are. It makes Xie Lian wonder if they aren’t feeling just as unsettled as he is by the whole thing.

Mu Qing and Feng Xin are adamant that they remain with him, enough so that they agree to share the upstairs room in the absence of any other options. Xie Lian is quietly grateful, not yet used to the consistency of their presence, how often they stay.

The childlike version of him, who shook to pieces in a very different cottage with nothing but the creaking of a wood beam under strain to accompany him, sobs in relief.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Xie Lian wakes to sobbing.

The type of muted misery characterised only by hitching gasps and muffled fabric haphazardly sweeping against skin.

The room is pitch black, not even illuminated by the flickering moonlight intermittently revealing and concealing itself through the clouds. He can hear shuffling above him, no more than a body turning over in sleep, before the upper levels fall back to silence.

The sobbing persists.

In all honesty it’s barely audible, even to a martial god's sensitive hearing. He’s not even sure he can classify it as sobbing, past the prolonged misery of the sound, much more akin to weeping perhaps, or a very wet type of whimper. He is confused, initially, forgetting about the past day’s events. Then he notices the absence of a solid coolness at his back, or lounged across his chest, and everything returns with the slow clarity all dawning miseries do.

He sits up, slowly, silently. Despite this, the sobbing, the weeping, stops immediately, leaving nothing but an even fainter pitter against wood. It sounds almost like springtime showers, or the very last few seconds before the cessation of Hua Cheng’s blood rain.

“Hong-er?” He asks into the darkness, for who else could it be?

The silence is deafening in its answer.

“What’s wrong?”

“Dianxia?” Xie Lian freezes at the title, stumbling forward off the bed.

“San-” He begins, before he thinks better of it, knowing that the voice that answered him is still far too young. Regardless, the title, normally his least favourite of all San Lang’s names for him, sparks a rush of joy in his chest. It is a step closer to the omniscience, the omnibenevolence, that paints his San Lang as more of a God than any Heavenly Official Xie Lian knows.

“Hong-er?” He says again, taking another blind step forward.

He stills when his bare foot meets wetness, too thick to be water. Without thinking too much about it, he lights a small palm fire, throwing the room into muted illumination.

If the flame was not an extension of himself, he would have dropped it and set the whole room alight.

“Hong-er!” He shouts, darting forward to grab the child’s wrist, barely acknowledging the slight elongation of Hong-er’s limbs, the faintly harsher line of his jaw against the firelight, the cheeks sunken with more than just starvation.

All he really sees is red.

It’s everywhere. On the floor, on the wall at the child’s back, on his robes and Xie Lian’s robes and the sharp shard of glass clutched in his bloodied fist. The front portion of his hair is soaked with it, dripping down onto his collarbone as it gushes over his cheek and jaw.

He is no longer covering his eye, it shines just as bright a red from his bloodied, tear-soaked face.

It’s beautiful, and Xie Lian is quietly bereft that the first time he has witnessed the eye where it belonged is in such horrifying circumstances.

There are long, deep gouges against his brow, his cheek, the lid of the eye itself. If Xie Lian had light enough and time, he would see the stripped flesh piled beneath the boys’ nails.

“Mu Qing! Feng Xin!” Xie Lian calls, moving his one free hand forward to transfer his grip to try and grab the wrist still clutched around the glass shard. Hong-er shuffles back further into the corner, only holding the shard closer to his chest. His eyes are wide and fixed, seemingly uncaring of the way his blood pools into his vision. Xie Lian cannot be certain if the tears that fall from his right eye are bloody because of his wound, or the eye itself.

“Hong-er let go, you’re hurting yourself!”

“I don’t want it.” Hong-er whimpers, breaths so quick the words are stuttered and slurred. He grips the glass like a lifeline. “I don’t want it anymore.”

Xie Lian’s hand is outstretched uselessly in front of him, unable to comprehend the way such a known and loved colour is splashed against his skin and suddenly sending such a wave of misery through him. This has never happened with his own, no matter the severity of his wound or the level of his loss.

He has loved red fiercely ever since he met San Lang on that cart, decked out in crimson and surrounded by vibrant maple leaves that paled in comparison. Even before, he had been fond of the colour, loving the way brides of the villages he frequented dazzled in their wedding robes enough to offset the speckled association of pain and suffering.

It’s the first time he’s hated the sight of it.

He can hear Mu Qing and Feng Xin hurrying down the stairs, an indignant cacophony of stray elbows and startled worry.  

Xie Lian can’t move.

“I can’t get it out.” Hong-er whispers, bringing his bloodied hand up to his eye again and forcing his nails back into the wounds. It makes such a familiar sound, the tearing of wet flesh, that Xie Lian feels sick. “I can’t-”

“What the fuck is going on?” Mu Qing yells, startling Xie Lian out of his daze enough for his grip to tighten against Hong-er’s wrist.

Hong-er has not a fraction of Hua Cheng’s strength, and though Xie Lian has never had to do more than ask Hua Cheng to stay still to overcome him, he knows if it came down to it he’d have him beat in brute strength. Regardless, the unavoidable need to inflict no further pain, combined with the horrible desperation of the human spirit, leaves him unable to pull the clawed fingertips away from the wounds.

“Help me hold him.”

“No!” Hong-er cries, pushing himself as far into the corner as he can manage, eyes wide and fixed on Xie Lian beseechingly. Xie Lian almost crumples in his request, struck by the absolute agony fixed on him. “Dianxia, please, get it out, I don’t want it.”

“Hong-er, drop the glass.” Xie Lian says, applying no more than another fraction of strength through his hand around the child’s wrist. A flinch stopes him dead, and without further prompting, Mu Qing steps forward to grapple the boy’s arm out from his body, forcing him onto his back horizontal to the wall lest his shoulder dislocate from its socket.

Xie Lian wants to tell him to be gentler, but he doesn’t get much more than opening his mouth before Hong-er’s thrashing grows even worse, enough so that Mu Qing has to steady his knee against the boy’s side in a half crouch and pin the arm belonging to the still clenched fist with his own. Hong-er’s thrashing only grows.

“No, stop it!”

“Fucking kid’s damn strong for a runt.” Mu Qing hisses, narrowly avoiding a hit to the head as Xie Lian’s lacklustre grip slips enough for Hong-er to free his second hand, removing it from its own clawed position at his eye to make a jab at Mu Qing’s.

“Let go!” Hong-er screams, eyes blown wide in panic and bloodied tears flowing back to flood his lash line and stripe up his temples. “Leave me alone!”

Mu Qing hisses as a particularly opportunistic thrash manages to catch him in the temple, it has nothing on what a blow from Crimson Rain at his peak could have done, but whatever demonic adrenaline the child’s acting under certainly lent him some strength.

Xie Lian, finally coming back to his senses, makes another grab for Hong-er’s other wrist, managing to pin it down across the child’s chest. He starts to coo at the kid placatingly, which Mu Qing finds slightly nauseating and altogether unwarranted, but ignores in favour of shooting a viscous look over his shoulder.

“Get it off him Feng Xin!”

“Why me?!”

“You’re the only one not fucking doing anything!”

Feng Xin, despite his reluctancy at advancing any closer than the base of the stairs since he had first noticed the bloody scene that greeted them, strides to Mu Qing’s side. Hong-er’s kicks and screams only get worse, and Feng Xin vows he will never again complain about Cuo Cuo’s outbursts after this. He grips Hong-er’s wrist (so small, even now) and pries the clenched fingers open as firmly as he can without snapping them.

The flesh of the hand is shredded, the white edge of bone visible against several of the fingers.

“No! Give it back!” Hong-er cries, as Feng-Xin peels the glass edge from the deep lacerations where it is wedged, pressing his robe to the wound as it starts to bleed. “Give it back!”

“Hong-er.” Xie Lian says, raising his free hand to the boy’s face and smoothing back the blood-soaked hair. “Shh, darling, you’re alright.”

“Dianxia!”

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t want it!” Hong-er cries, tears falling to his temples and further soaking into his hairline. “It’s wrong! I don’t want it!”

Feng Xin glances up to His Highness, for further instruction or simple reassurance. Xie Lian’s gaze is fixed onto Hong-er’s right side, prompting Feng Xin’s gaze to drop to it too. He catches a glimpse of the shredded wounds against the boy’s brow and check, the red raw skin of his eye socket and the way the blood trickles down his face in misery. It makes him feel a bit sick, and very sad.

Even now, the child’s no more than 10, probably younger.

Everyone knows that Crimson Rain has suffered, no one could become a Calamity without a strength of endurance bred from cataclysmic misery.

But this is a child.

And Feng Xin is a father.

Children should not suffer like this.

“Shh, don’t say that. There’s nothing wrong with you.” Xie Lian says.

For a single second, Hong-er breathes in without the exhale being forced from him, the sob settling in his throat in exchange for a shaking expiration. The next one is just as frantic, but the small reprieve was noted by Xie Lian, and evidently intended to be utilised with further gentle encouragement.  

Feng Xin begins to relax, thinking that simple words and reassurances spoken in the quiet, melodic voice only Xie Lian can fully manage might just be enough to settle the child. At least back to the equally sad but significantly simpler mild catatonia he’d been favouring since Xie Lian had bought him back from the bath.

Mu Qing, characteristically, opens his mouth unthinkingly and completely ruins the whole thing.

“Ha!” He says, hair flicked over his shoulder to avoid the end trailing into the blood. “I should’ve known.”

“What?” Feng Xin says, trying to follow Mu Qing’s gazed but blocked by his shoulder.

“His eye.” Mu Qing says, smug in his own revelation, leaning back from where he has pinned Hong-er’s arm to clear the lie of Feng Xin’s sight. “Look at it.”

Hong-er, taking advantage of the Generals presumptuous relaxation, slaps his ruined hand over his eye again. He is not fast enough to miss the flash of recognition that flows over Feng Xin’s face at the familiar glean of a red iris.

Mu Qing huffs. “That’s what made that fucking curse of a blade.”         

Hong-er flinches back so harshly he dislodges Xie Lian’s grip, his back colliding once more into the wall of the cottage. He scrambles to his feet, old enough now to have some real speed to the movement. He must be ten now, maybe a year or so younger, it is always so hard to tell with the persistency of his malnourishment.

Xie Lian throws Mu Qing and Feng Xin a vicious glare, so angry at their poor read of the situation, or their pure inability to reconcile a child against a mutually detested adult, that he does not care a fraction for the drop of Mu Qing’s face, the startled rise of his shoulders. It has been so long since they were faced by Xie Lian’s genuine ire. Feng Xin himself outwardly flinches from the look, feeling the shame regardless of his comparable lack of involvement in the deteriorating situation.

Xie Lian’s glare softens to disappointment.

That more than anything startles. It stings.

In the time it takes Xie Lian to make sure his wordless message is heard, Hong-er has scrambled up to his feet, pushed through the door and broken out into a run through the front yard of the cottage.

“Hong-er!” Xie Lian cries, scrambling up to his own feet. His hands and robes are bloodied, though he seems to care little for anything other than the fleeing child.

Mu Qing and Feng Xin make to rise with him, but he stops them before they have even fully stood from kneeling.

“Please, both of you stay here.” Xie Lian says, a shake of his head betraying more tacky, rusted strands of his hair sticking to his robes. “You’ve done enough.”

They both know it isn’t a positive statement.

Xie Lian himself runs from the cottage without another thought to his two friends, still able to make out Hong-er’s retreating back in the distance. He’s running up the mountain, which tactically makes little sense. If Xie Lian was any less knowledgeable about how smart Hua Cheng was even as a child (not so much in academics than in survival) he would think it an oversight in his panic. Especially given that the alternative would have left him comforted with a village on the cusp of morning, one that he would not have known to be any more tolerant than the one that had shunned him so thoroughly in his past.

Hong-er does not know the area well enough in this time to know of a village. It makes no sense for him to flee to higher ground.

Xie Lian runs faster, eternally grateful for the absence of the shackles returning his usual luck to him, and with it his grace unimpeded by slips and falls.

Hong-er is a fast child, which makes a shameful level of sense. He has made some ground before Xie Lian catches up with him, only once he has skidded to a stop himself. The dawn light is illuminating just enough of the landscape for Xie Lian to see depth fully, enough to notice that the ground ends at Hong-er’s feet. He can hear the loud rush of water beneath them, the way the river smashes against the rocks at the base of the inlay.

Hong-er ran to higher ground.

Where the trail becomes thin, and the rocks unstable and the options for retreat narrow to little more than falling.

Xie Lian can hear Hong-er’s heartbeat.

He can hear San Lang’s heartbeat.

He doesn’t know what will happen if that stops, has not heard back from Ling Wen or Yin Yu on the specifics of this curse, whether the diamond ashes at his neck are enough protection when the soul they belong to is linked less to them and more to a mortal body.

It’s terrifying.

“Hong-er.” He whispers, terrified of making the noise any louder, when a flinch in the wrong direction could send his San Lang plummeting. He braces Ruoye in his sleeve, ready to grab for him.

“Hong-er please.” He says, when the child only shakes, eyes fixed downward.

“I don’t want it.” The boy whispers, and Xie Lain can swear he sees him swaying forward, despite how he does not tumble from sight.

Xie Lian dares to take a slow step forward. “Hong-er, please come here.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“Nothing’s your fault.”

“You should have let me fall.” Hong-er says, drawing a stained sleeve up to angrily rub at the blood and tears that must be covering his face. His voice is so mournful, far too sad for discussing such an important moment in both of their lives, like the one thing Xie Lian has never been able to regret is plaguing him.

“Never.”

Hong-er’s head tilts back towards the sunrise, and Xie Lain cannot see enough of his expression to know whether he is basking in the sunshine, or simply trying to prevent any more tears from escaping his eyes. He takes another step forward, halting immediately when the motion prompts Hong-er to turn, eyes wide with misery and heels no more than a hairs width from the edge.

He’s so young. He’s just a child.

Xie Lian feels like he is barely breathing, hand coming up to clutch San Lang’s ashes in a self-soothing motion he has never wanted to shake.

He is so used to seeing this misery on E-Ming, the shaking so familiar, the tears and trembling so well-known. It makes the way Hua Cheng treats the blade even more heart-breaking, like he’s simply taken on the role of beating a sad child into submission, not knowing any other way to shut it up when it sobs.

It never did make any sense, his San Lang’s lack of acceptance for E-Ming. Hua Cheng is brilliant with children, endlessly patient. It had never truly clicked to Xie Lian why his treatment of his own spiritual weapon made him so upset, why seeing Hua Cheng, who is so much gentler than anyone would ever believe, treat something so harshly was painful.

It’s just more self-mutilation. It’s just more punishment.

“You should have taken them when Guoshi said to.” Hong-er says, waving a weary hand towards his eyes. The wounds on his face are still bleeding, red and raw and white at the edges from exposed flesh. They would scar if they were given the time to heal.

“No.” Xie Lian says, adamant. He would rather remove his own, than ever subject his San Lang to anything like that again. The thought alone is something that has kept him up at night. Of San Lang alone at Mount Tonglu, more nameless than he is known at that point, half mad and ruined.

Clawing his own eye out in desperation.

(“Don’t worry Gege, I always hated the thing”. Hua Cheng had said, arms around his waist as they read together, lounging in nothing but silk sheets against the headboard of their bed in their room at Paradise Manor. It is the first time Xie Lian has asked about it, prompted by the depiction of the event they had stumbled upon in their current book of tales. “It was a relief, to finally do it.”)              

“Why don’t you hate me?” Hong-er says, bereft and lost at the edge of the world. Just a child. A child. “I’ve ruined everything.”

“You haven’t. Not at all.” Xie Lian insists, still feeling too far away but unwilling to take any steps further forward lest he push Hong-er to retreat any further, there is nowhere else for him to retreat, he must entice him forward instead. “I asked you to live for me. I meant it then and I mean it now.”

“Xianle was my fault.” Hong-er whispers, barely audible and broken around a dry sob.

“Xianle was Bai Wuxiang’s fault.”

Hong-er shakes his head, taking a single step towards Xie Lian unprompted. “You don’t understand.”

“Help me understand.”

Xie Lian falls to his knees, opening his arms in invitation. He could have cried out in joy as the boy stumbles forward, collapsing against his chest just as he had before, bloodied hands clutching the equally bloody robes over the god’s lap. Xie Lian folds his arms around him in what he hopes feels more like a hug than a hold, dropping his lips to the child’s head with his own quiet sob. Nicely muffled and irrelevant in the face of his world’s misery.

“…I called you Gege.” Hong-er says, as if in explanation. “In the shrine.”

Xie Lian rests his cheek atop his head. “I wanted you to, sweet boy.”

“No…before, before it all.” Hong-er says, hands curling even more desperately into the fabric bunched within them. “The curse… I should never have been so familiar.”

“You’re not a curse.”

“I am!” He cries, burrowing his face into Xie Lia’s stomach, as if to hide. “Mama-”

“Must have loved you very much.” Xie Lian says, thinking back on the set of Hua Cheng’s jewellery, on the penchant for butterfly’s resultant from more than just their proclivity for flowers. Of a lullaby hummed into his skin on the bad nights where terrors grip him and Hua Cheng holds him just as he is now, letting the vibrations of his mouth hum through Xie Lian’s core until he settles.      

“I killed her.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Hong-er wails, and if Xie Lian hadn’t recently known the heartbreak of a silent child the sound would pierce him.

“I don’t want to do it anymore.” Hong-er sobs, tears soaking into the white fabric by Xie Lian’s neck, staining the fabric pink. He is shaking like a leaf, like petals, like butterfly wings. His pain reverberates.

“Oh darling.” Xie Lian says, hand sweeping through his hair and cupping the back of his skull. “Sweet boy, it’s okay.”

Hong-er cries until his throat is sore, the sounds broken and hoarse and desperate, until clouds have accumulated and begun to rain their own despair down onto the ground surrounding them.

“I’m here, darling.” Xie Lian sooths, rocking the two of them. “I’m here.”

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Hua Cheng, once returned to his usual glory, says absolutely nothing about the whole event.

Initially, Xie Lian must assume he remembers none of it, such is the lack of acknowledgement towards anything being at all wrong. They fall back into their regular habits, eating and drinking together, answering prayers and handling business in Ghost City together, sleeping together in all meaning of the phrase.  

His San Lang, blissfully, is exactly how he always is.

Even their regular tea taking with Mu Qing and Feng Xin at the cottage resumed. And if Hua Cheng noticed anything off about the Generals of the South’s behaviour, he made no mention of it. Neither did he mention the comparable lack of bite to their taunts, or the way their gaze flickered between him and E-Ming when the blade hurried forward to help Xie Lian with dinner preparations, how they make comparably less abrupt movements and uncharacteristically make no direct threats towards him.

Xie Lian finds queries on the tip of his tongue often, finds himself yearning for an already lost conversation, for another attempt to settle something he had been unable to soothe in the moment.

Still, absolutely nothing is said about any of it.

Until Mu Qing, arms rested on the table and hands cradled around a cup of the latest tea batch, off handily says – “Do you really not like red?”

Hua Cheng’s flinches are nothing like Hong-er’s, they’re all in his brow, his eye, the edge of a fang glimpsed through his lips as one pulls ever so slightly upward.

Xie Lian is well versed enough to see it.

And he realises that Hua Cheng has not forgotten the previous days.

Rather that he is horrified by them.

It is played off in the moment with biting retort, soon developing into a three-way verbal brawl with nothing but Xie Lian’s de-escalations as platitudes.

Later, when they have retired to their room in Paradise Manor, stripped to their inner robes and taking it in turns to brush out the others long hair, as Hua Cheng is sat at their dressing table and turned away from the mirror as he always prefers to be, that Xie Lian finally gathers the courage to question it.

He takes a deep breath.

“San Lang?”

“Yes, beloved?” Hua Cheng breathes, reverent as he leans his head back against Xie Lian’s arm, opening his eyes to face him fully from his unturned angle.

“You know I love you in any form, yes?”

“Gege-”

“Any form, San Lang.” Xie Lian insists, tapping the base of a sharp jawline to maintain the backwards curve of Hua Cheng’s neck, ensuring their eye contact. “That includes Hong-er.”

“Gege speaks too highly of this one.”  Hua Cheng says, voice low and eyes shrouded. “There is no need.”

“Why are you not talking to me?” Xie Lian asks, keeping a steady grip on Hua Cheng’s chin as he tries to turn away. “You remember? Don’t you? You just don’t want to speak.”

“What is there to say.” A sigh accompanies, a dark eye falling shut when there is no other route of escape from the inspection. “Gege should not have to touch such filth.”

“Don’t say such things.” A gentle thumb taps to his jaw, like the softest of admonishments. A kiss follows it, slightly awkward given the angle. “You are one and the same.”

“And all of it as repugnant as the last.”

“San Lang.” A firmer tap, without the accompanying balm. “I won’t hear it. I want to talk about you, I want to talk about Hong-er.”

Hua Cheng’s head tilts down towards the floor, shoulders hunching until the wide spray of his shoulder blades protrude like wings. The image could superimpose itself over the position Hong-er would adopt, an instinctual protection of vital points, a hidden neck, chest and viscera.

Silence settles, and Xie Lian waits for it to be broken patiently, letting himself be pulled by Hua Cheng to the bed, laid down underneath the thin covers and the hanging canopy until the left side of his head is pressed to a silk pillow. Hua Cheng climbs in beside him, arms coming round to loop over Xie Lian’s waist and down under his back.

“San Lang.”

“Please don’t, Gege.” Hua Cheng says at last, prompted to speak only by the sound of Xie Lian’s voice, as if he had already been waiting for the sound before speaking. His voice is soft, and sadder than Xie Lian can remember hearing in this form. “I will never deny you, but humbly, I request this to be forgotten.”

“But Hong-”

“He’s dead, beloved.” 

Xie Lian stops, after all, it is very rare that San Lang interrupts him.       

Hua Cheng nuzzles the base of his chin against the top of Xie Lian’s head, pressing a gentle kiss to the crown as he settles. Xie Lian presses his nose into the skin of Hua Cheng’s neck, sinking into the comforting hands against his waist and shoulder blade.

He barely hears the next words; his eyes are halfway to closed before he can refute them.

“As he should be.”